When I first opened my Facebook account, I was amazed at how easy it was to reconnect with old friends or middle school classmates. I had almost forgotten their names but once I connected with one or two, the Facebook algorithm (in its infancy back then) made sure I could rebuild my entire class.
It was fun. I enjoyed seeing how they had grown up, matured, and changed their facial features and ideas.
Then Facebook asked me to connect to more people. People I hardly knew or had never met in my life; but Facebook swore we had things in common, so it prompted us to connect to each other, “poke” (remember that feature?) each other, or start a conversation on Facebook Messenger.
The faces of my middle school and high school classmates dissipated among the hundreds of brand-new faces. I could hardly ever see their posts and Facebook stopped encouraging me to message them, with one exception — on their birthday.
But it’s kinda weird to tell someone you wish them all the best when you haven’t spoken to them in nearly a decade, isn’t it?
Well, Facebook didn’t care, really. It changed priorities.
At first, it wanted me to create an account and reconnect with my old friends and acquaintances. Then it wanted us to talk to each other. Then it wanted us to stop talking to each other and look at the ads they cram in my feed to BUY something.
It really, really insists on that last part because advertisers are fleeing from the Meta platforms in droves. And no, it’s not because the Facebook population is aging and dropping.
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It’s because of how Facebook sets and resets priorities. To be fair, it’s not just them — it’s everyone, every single platform that reaches the “behemoth” stage.
The social media platform lifecycle in a nutshell
- Be good to the users
- Be bad to the users so you can be good to advertisers
- Be bad to advertisers to get a bigger profit
- RIP (or reconfigure everything, but I’ve never seen this happen yet)
Essentially, social media networks are middlemen. They connect buyers to sellers and aim to maintain a good balance between the two.
Ah, but balances are always elusive, aren’t they? Money can easily tip the scales and it does — every time. When those scales are tipped, the tipping point never favors the users.
Not sure how a social network will fare in the future? My over-simplified but fully functional recipe for accurate predictions is: follow the money.
Step 1: use money to attract users
Step 2: divert a significant chunk of that money to attract paying users (sellers)
Step 3: use the paying users’ money to line shareholders’ pockets
The Facebook model: use honey to attract users. Serve up those users to the highest bidder
I’m sure my story about the beginnings of Facebook sounds familiar to you. It was a fun place to be because it was a social platform in the truest meaning of the term.
Or at least that’s what we thought. Facebook was designed as an advertising company from the beginning. The goal has always been to design a better place for ads, not for socializing. The latter was just a stepping stone for the former.
So why is Facebook struggling?
In theory, their business model is simple: put sellers and buyers together and let them have some fun in the process.
In practice, though, things got murky when greediness got the best of Facebook.
In phase two of the lifecycle, the users were less content with Facebook but the advertisers thrived. You could pay as little as $50 to have your products shown to hundreds of thousands of people. What’s not to like?
Facebook, however, decided to turn against them too.
Against the backdrop of a lower number of active and engaged users and the Cambridge Analytica scandal (remember that kerfuffle?), Facebook upped its advertising prices and placed a ton of senseless tripwires into advertisers’ accounts.
All in the name of protecting their users from scammers and data breaches.
To add insult to injury, Facebook declared war on media companies and significantly reduced the organic reach of posts that contained links. The story of College Humor and how they were killed by Facebook’s inflated video viewership numbers and low-reach policy is a powerful cautionary tale about tying your business to a social media platform.
Adam Conover’s thread about it is an excellent (yet scary) read.
[Sidenote: every social media platform has the same obsession: external links will banish you to the purgatory of invisibility, which you can only escape from by paying. Twitter Blue, for instance, gets you more reach, links and all, just like Facebook Ads do. But this approach kills media companies and creators “in their crib.”]
2022 was the first year when Facebook’s revenue from ads dropped. While some analysts think their ad revenue will resume its growth, the numbers (adjusted for inflation) don’t look particularly promising.
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Image via Oberlo
In fact, when a Meta executive has to say that “contrary to reports otherwise, Facebook is not dead nor dying, but in fact alive and thriving with 2 billion daily active users”, you know that the platform is in trouble.
Yes, Facebook reached a new milestone: 2 billion active users each day is nothing to snark at. But user growth has been sluggish in recent years and, while Facebook is indeed alive, it’s also struggling.
While Zuckerberg seemed so committed to his latest bet on the Metaverse that he changed the company’s name altogether, news of progress on this front has been slow to inundate our feeds. In fact, much like everyone else, Meta wants to bet on AI now.
The promise of an alternate universe where users are avatars and advertisers are treated better didn’t really catch on with Facebook’s enraged clients. I wonder what eroded advertisers’ trust in Meta…
The reverse-Facebook model: TikTok bet on creators to act as its honey(trap)
TikTok made a different, two-pronged bet:
- They attracted new users with a completely new format: short videos set to music (a format that Facebook and YouTube are still playing catch-up on)
- They bet on creators to attract new hordes of users.
That second point deserves a bit more analysis: every social media platform tries to “sequester” users from other platforms in the hope that they will develop a Stockholm syndrome of sorts and never want to leave theirs.
TikTok stole creators from Instagram because it was easy to do it. Instagram followed the Facebook model, and creators’ organic reach dropped. By 2021, most Instagram creators and publishers agreed that it’s nearly impossible to grow a new account without paid ads.
Enter TikTok with an offer that very few creators could afford to refuse: just join and WE will make sure your content gets traction.
It was seemingly easy for them to do it: the For You page on TikTok was uncannily good at suggesting videos that users would like. So good, in fact, that it kept users hooked for hours on end.
Let’s recap: you have an excellent recommendations algorithm and hordes of unhappy creators who are waiting for a minimal incentive to flee their current platform to yours.
What do you do?
You use that algorithm to boost new creators’ content, of course! In 2021 and 2022, the Instagram “immigrants” were swooning at how fast they can grow on TikTok. Open an account, post a video and BAM! 200K views overnight.
Too good to be true, right? Absolutely!
Turns out TikTok’s fabulous organic reach for creators wasn’t that organic after all. TikTok used a secret “heating” button to manually push certain videos to fame, according to an investigation by Forbes.
They used this strategy to “court” creators and advertisers. To show them the endless growth opportunities TikTok has in store for them.
How could that backfire, you ask? Well, I’m sure you can anticipate at least one of the ways.
Facebook and TikTok: different bets, similar results
Just the Facebook feed, the FYP (For You Page) stopped being so good — it needed to push new creators, remember? By mid-2021, the internet was flooded by TikTok users looking for a way to get their old FYP back.
The first red flag is here: TikTok stopped being nice to its users.
As expected, the second red flag wasn’t too far behind. In fact, it looks like TikTok took all the bad decisions Facebook and Twitter ever made and fast-tracked them.
Facebook crammed our feeds with media companies. In turn, those media companies became dependent upon the traffic Facebook sent their way. When Facebook killed their organic reach, they had to pay or perish. (Or give up all their content for free and for zero ad revenue.)
TikTok didn’t shy away from doing the same: they “heated” a few posts by new creators and advertisers, then took their almighty finger off the button.
Remember: “heating” was done manually and completely discretionary, depending on TikTok’s interest in securing a deal with a certain company or a certain creator. Not all creators or all advertisers benefitted from this.
More importantly, no user benefitted from this.
The ethical implications run deeper than the Cambridge Analytica scandal: TikTok discretionarily pushed videos in billions of feeds. Without the “ad” label, the users thought those videos were for them. They watched them because they had grown to trust the algorithm.
Couple this with the fact that a lot of teens and pre-teens spend a lot of time on TikTok and you’ll see why this is extremely problematic.
While the platform is still growing, it’s not challenge-free. The US government threatens to ban it. Some see the Senate debate as posturing — the relationship between China and the US is already as chilly as it van be, but mostly at a political stance level.
Right now, TikTok is banned from official devices across all three government institutions in the EU. US federal employees will also have to uninstall it, as will Canadian government employees.
Legal battles and privacy issues aside, TikTok has moved incredibly fast from being the new cool kid on the block to messing up feeds and enraging everyone at the same time: users, creators, and advertisers.
I almost miss Facebook’s sluggishness at shitting the bed.
Quo vadis, LinkedIn?
As always, LinkedIn is the odd duck. The platform recently surpassed 900 million users. It’s no longer a platform where you upload your resume and forget about it until your next job hunt.
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Image via Data Reportal
So it started attracting creators — quite a lot of them.
But there’s a twist: LinkedIn is still primarily a business platform. While Instagram-style influencers have had a go at it, the platform isn’t home to kids hoping to go viral because of a weird dance. Yet.
Professional skills matter on LinkedIn more than on Instagram or TikTok. This is the new breed of creators [I’ve written more about the creator economy here].
LinkedIn knows that there’s money in advertising to professionals with sizeable incomes (or, at least larger than those of the average TikTok and Instagram user). While it hasn’t enraged its creators or its users yet, the Microsoft-owned company manage to skip straight to enraging paying advertisers and recruiters by hiking their subscription fees.
Thus far, LinkedIn has managed to keep everyone relatively happy. But there’s something about significant influxes of users that makes social media platforms go off the rails.
Even on LinkedIn, there have been subtle changes in organic reach: sometimes, it seems to favor everyone. Other times, it’s plummeting with no obvious explanation.
To me, this is the first sign of a red flag making its appearance. Microsoft will try to capitalize on its offspring’s sudden uptick in popularity. Whether they have learned from their peers’ mistakes or not remains to be see.
Can you game the system? Should you be an unwilling accomplice to “benevolent dictators”?
Platforms live and die by their algorithm changes. And by the irresistible desire to grow, dammit, whatever the cost.
That’s not a bad thing. In fact, a bit of decentralization may do us all some good.
I echo the sentiment of this tweet:
“I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
Platforms come and go but what about the users? Like it or not, we are (more or less) unwilling accomplices to the rise and fall of big tech.
“The Big Tech platforms style themselves as “benevolent dictators.” Sure, they have the final say over your digital life, but they only wield that power because they want to help you.”
Source
We learn “algospeak” so we can gain the favor of these dictators.
- What’s the best time to post?
- How many hashtags should I include?
- Should I add external links? Is usability worth the decline in reach?
- Add a photo! People are visual creatures and the algorithm repays you!
I think you’re familiar with these thoughts. I think you’re also familiar with how fast things change.
By the time you figure out the right time to post, the right format, and the ideal place to shove that link, the “benevolent dictators change things up.
It’s for your own good, of course.
As always, I invite you to engage in a bit of critical thinking:
- If you need to be told that something is for your own good, it’s probably not.
- When that starts happening, look for another traffic/leads source.
- Spot the first signs of platform degradation so you can leave the platform before it becomes a time-drain and nothing else.
- Popular platforms gyrate. But a solid strategy can be easily migrated to “the next hot thing in social media land”. By the way, I can help you with yours.
If there’s one thing you remember from today’s edition, make it this one: when users are starting to get enraged about a platform, that’s your first cue. The second is enraged advertisers. When those start fleeing, you should already be elsewhere.
That being said, social media are a necessary evil for most businesses. But you can beat them at their own game.
Borrow a page from their manual: just as big platforms use users as a stepping stone for getting to paying customers, you can use them as a stepping stone to drive traffic to your own platform.
That’s it from me today!
See you next Thursday!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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Adriana’s Picks
- The Free 3 is the newsletter I wish I had access to back when I was a freelancer. Each week, Gabe shares resources on scaling your freelancing business or pivoting to solopreneurship. Subscribe here!
- How to leave dying social media platforms, an interesting essay and the place I borrowed “benevolent dictators” from.
- A LinkedIn feature to appease the recruiters enraged by the price hikes.
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