Social media is a complex mix of human self-organization and powerful top-down, algorithmic control. To be successful on any platform is to strike a careful balance between pleasing the platform algorithms and platform users you share digital space with. Chaotically, the rules and community vibe can shift at any time so, to engage meaningfully one must engage continually.
One must engage fully as a user of these services for many years to fully understand them. Only at the furthest reaches of addiction, sometimes in bed at 4am, can the user gain first-hand knowledge of the most profitable social media tactics. And knowledge of these things are integral to your project. Fortunately, I'll have a course on that soon, so you won't have to go to those depths.
Talking to users online requires a detailed profile of whom you're communicating with. Target market, complete community profile (values, rules of engagement, geographical projections, etc.), race, age, and sexual identity will be necessary to capture your ideal clientele's essence. Some of this can be estimated, but some knowledge is only acquired from first-hand conversational experience with every type of person who uses the internet. Fortunately, I'll have a course coming out on that soon, so you'll have a million-dollar viewpoint into what it takes to talk a pink-haired lesbian into buying your silicone AirPods case protector.
But the hardest slab of meat to digest right now is the topic for right before eating it:
Our father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy algorithm.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy post be shown
on X as it is on FB.
AMEN.
I'M JOKING.
BUT YOU KINDA SEE WHAT I'M GETTING AT, RIGHT? YOU KNOW THE TYPE?
There's a better way
Social media is indeed a complex mix of human self-organization and powerful top-down controls and the rules are constantly changing. It's a difficult balance. But you don't need to know some ancient secret only accessible in a Tibetan monastery. It's all, actually, very simple.
You need to know what you're posting, where people hear you, and which platform caters to what.
Notice how I didn't say it would be easy. Simple things are usually harder.
1) GENRE: what are you posting?
2) WHERE: where are you heard?
3) ECOLOGY: what constraints come from your followers and the site? What advantages?
I've identified over 60 genres of posts that, combined with over 10 major social media platforms, allow for many combinations of variables your post is subject to. The good news is that you don't need to know every variation of post and platform, but you definitely need to know what you're doing.
To accurately judge the feedback you receive from social media, you need to be able to accurately judge what you're putting into it.
Garbage in, garbage out. They say.
If you don't know what you're putting into social media and it does well, that's great. But you risk being unable to repeat your previous success.
Much like in real life, depending on who you're looking for, the process of finding and having them remember you can vary in difficulty.
If you're looking for someone specific, a minor success could be difficult to come by and indicate you've touched on an idea with great potential. When that time comes, one can only hope they're prepared enough to know why that magic happened and be able to revisit it.
That last paragraph applies to a lot of things if you think about it.
To be more specific, you have an increased chance of repeating the success that drove a previous post if you know the context it exists in, so you can attempt to recreate that context. The same reason why roofing contractors follow hail storms.
The breakdown
You should know what kind or genre of post you're crafting, such as a Personal Story Time post or a Business-Driven Thought Leadership post.
The specific details of where you get heard. Where are your fans? Are they your friends and family on FB? or, has your Tic-Tok grown recently?
Just like a group of friends have unspoken rules depending on who they're around and where they're at, so do social media platforms. If you act one way on one site and act the same way on a completely different site there can be horrible consequences and incompatibilities.
It all seems obvious until you're trying to differentiate if what you wrote for LinkedIn is a Professional Announcement or a Networking Post. Sometimes, that slightly different intention can make a reasonable difference.
A good marketer knows how they engage people on the internet in order to notice when they have a good idea, and you should too. In other words, even though the internet is a complex place with unknowable forces invisible to the naked eye, as long as you know what you're hurling into it you should find success.
The primary prerequisite is that you need to know when your posts perform well for you. If you don't know what you want from posting online, I feel sorry for you. Neither do I most of the time. That should be the topic for another time, however.
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