“Nothing works on social media anymore” is something I hear quite often from enraged creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers.
They’re half right. Nothing works reliably and consistently anymore.
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The social graph from the early days of social media
To most of us in the Millennial or older generations, the social graph made the most sense because that’s how we were introduced to social media.
In a social graph algorithm, your feed will display posts from people you are connected to and/or topics and hashtags you have chosen to follow.
The Shelf has a great summary:
You might recall how, in the early days of Facebook, you saw your cousin’s wedding pics before anything else. I wrote about how social media has changed here.
Until 2020 or so, most social media platforms prioritized content this way. Until the TikTok revolution happened.
TikTok and the exploit versus explore paradox
Back in 2020, TikTok introduced the For You page. Cute name and it seemed innocent.
Well, it wasn’t.
The For You page is based on an eerily accurate algorithm that can guess exactly what you’re into right now.
→ New user? They use cookies from other apps to figure out what you like. The same happens if you don’t log into the app for a while.
→ Regular user? They’ve got you covered. They know with insane precision what you’re into right now, even when your tastes or interests change.
There are hundreds of academic articles and thousands of regular articles that try to explain why TikTok is so damn addictive for everyone. Here’s one. And another one. And another one.
The short answer: TikTok is addictive by design. By algorithm design.
TikTok did not invent the interest graph, though, as many people seem to believe.
They just pioneered the heavier reliance on it and almost every other social media network followed suit because, naturally, everyone wants you on their platform for as long as possible.
Hooked. Addicted.
Which brings us to:
The interest graph: the new social media world order
The interest graph is a type of algorithm that feeds you content based on your interests. You won’t see your cousin’s wedding photos if you haven’t engaged with said cousin in a while but you will see yet another political post from someone you don’t know and don’t follow because you engaged with similar content recently.
Image via The Shelf
And this, my friend, is how social media networks keep you engaged.
You may not be interested in your cousin’s posts, just the wedding photos for good family gossip, but, if you’ve recently discovered a new trendy diet, you will want to soak up everything about it.
For creators, the interest graph is hard to cope with because you’re only as good as your latest post — to those followers who don’t know you well enough.
Plus, even your regular followers, your most engaged audience members, will get caught up in their own interest graphs. Cheap social media dopamine is hard to resist.
B2B creators have an advantage here. Ironically enough, it is easier for them to create fanocracies than for B2C creators. You don’t need a fancy new outfit every day to keep people engaged but you do need to bring something new quite often to stay relevant.
LinkedIn is the odd duck here, as usual
LinkedIn is the last platform that (at least for now!) prioritizes social graph algorithms. You get more posts from people you follow and people you’ve engaged with in the past than from people you don’t know but who post about something you’re interested in.
That doesn’t mean there’s no interest graph component to it. Of course there is, that’s how you discover new creators.
Moreover, with the recent introduction of the For You video feed, LinkedIn is making a clear stance for interest graphs and it will likely move everything (text, video, photos, carousels) to this type of algorithm.
But it’s not all doom and gloom because:
The social graph and the interest graph work together, not separately
Let’s say you’re suddenly interested in food prepping. Social media networks notice it based on the content you engage with and serve you more and more food prepping posts.
However, the first posts they will send your way come from people in your social circle. If someone you follow or a family member posts about food prepping, you will see that first.
This is why you see creators flocking to trends, for instance. When everyone does the same silly TikTok dance, For You pages are inundated with it.
As a creator, you can choose to stay in the shadow while the trend runs its course OR you can do the damn dance and show up on your followers’ For You page too.
It’s not an easy choice.
Why is it so damn hard to build an audience in the interest graph era?
Simply put, because people’s interests are fleeting. During the pandemic, everyone baked, cooked, and worked out indoors. So they consumed content on these topics.
Today, their interests have shifted.
The same goes for B2B content. You might rigorously follow a content writer on social media when content writing is a huge pain point for you.
After a while, though, that writer will have taught you everything they could OR you will have fixed your problem.
So you’ll move on to the next thorny pain in your business and your interest graph will look differently.
You might still follow that content writer who taught you a ton of things but you no longer engage with their posts. In turn, the writer is probably wondering ”why the heck do I only get 2,000 views on my post on a 200K audience?”
Because, like you, a lot of the early members of their audience have moved on.
The interest graph forces creators and internet entrepreneurs to do two things:
- Constantly increase their audience to add new people to their pipelines — new people with pain points that are thorny NOW.
- Come up with new types of content and new offers (a good primer on building them here) to keep their best audience members and their best clients engaged and paying.
How can you grow on social media despite the interest graph
Social media growth still happens. It just happens differently and you definitely can’t get it with 2010 Facebook-style posts.
Large followings are NOT useless
Sure, most people who follow you won’t see your posts.
BUT there will always be a few die-hard fans who wait for you to post and who engage with everything you put out there.
Remember, the social and interest graphs work together. The likes and comments of those die-hard fans signal that your post is relevant to some categories and it could get selected for further distribution if more people engage with it.
So, keep investing in growing your social media following. It won’t guarantee you virality but it will keep you “on the map.”
Choose your trends carefully
This is not just about silly TikTok dances and challenges.
There are a lot of seasonal or regular trends on any social media platform:
- The holiday season — people will post about it way before it starts and they will post their well wishes during the big yearly holidays. Those posts will always get pushed by algorithms because they’re wholesome and positive.
- Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and so on. Everyone’s in a frenzy (business owners looking to make bank and consumers hunting bargains), so #BlackFriday posts get more visibility. The caveat here is choosing your timing very well. Black Friday posts saturate the feeds quite quickly.
- Political stances, especially during election years, like 2024. While most algorithms discourage them, the users like divisive content, so they’ll jump on them.
- Any new fleeting trend. My social media bubble couldn’t stop talking about the recent Jaguar rebrand, for instance. Since it was a hot topic, those posts spread like wildfire.
A word of caution here: you cannot build real influence if all you’re doing is chasing trends. Sure, you’ll get some social media clout but that’s about it.
So make smart choices:
- Is it relevant for your brand to talk about politics?
- Do you need to post that Christmas tree photo? This is perhaps the most harmless of them all, so do it if you want to 🙂.
- Is it wise to run a Black Friday campaign? For instance, I ran an anniversary discount campaign two weeks before Black Friday, so running it again would have cheapened my brand. So I refrained from it.
- Can you truly capitalize on a fleeting trend or are you in it for the cheap dopamine? This is perhaps the hardest question to answer.
Make a conscious decision to grow your audience
Follow new people. Be social, leave comments. Support others.
These are all important. But you can’t spend hours every day massaging the algorithm, can you?
So make sure that at least one post of yours every week is specifically designed to grow your audience, get you on those For You pages, or get you trending in any other way.
There is no one-size-fits-all recipe here and what that post should be depends a lot on what your audience is interested in at any given point.
There are some rules of thumb, though:
- Contrarian takes spark engagement, which, in turn, sparks better reach. Just make sure they’re truly contrarian not lukewarm takes labeled as “hot takes”.
- Memes (especially if they’re trendy) do the same.
- Exceptionally good content (I cannot emphasize “exceptionally” enough) will always catch people’s eye.
- Leverage trends but sparingly (see above).
Social media is designed for entertainment, so building an audience won’t get any easier any time soon
Leverage the opportunities you have today because most social media platforms skew towards the interest graph more and more. If you’re in B2B or in a not-so-fun B2C industry, it will be harder and harder to fight funny videos, fails, cute cats, and more.
Looking to speed up your audience growth? Audience Accelerator, my flagship course, teaches you how to do it without spending 20+ hours a week on social media and without depending on fickle algorithms.
Spoiler alert: it’s all about building self-feeding growth loops on and off social media. Get instant access to the audience growth framework here.
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