After reviving my blog yesterday (the theoretical and philosophical part at least), I made a pivot going back to blogging and away from other public media arbitrage bazaars – namely, social media and social networks in this case.
There have been different reasons to do so, but if I have to enumerate the main ones:
- Social has been a terrible channel for “social selling” over the past 2 years. Unless you are in the business of selling likes, viral content, tabloid sites, or just low-ticket products. Or manage established billion-dollar brands that just need to maintain an omnipresent realm.
- Attention span is lower than ever.
- Social reach has been abysmal after 2022. Almost exclusively, most of my networks lost anywhere from 40% to 90% of the organic reach in 2023. Speaking about LinkedIn and X, this is confirmed by blue badge accounts, professionals and educators seeing a major drop in views (including accounts seeing 1 million impressions per post in 2021-2022 and gaining 50k – 100k today.)
- What ranks on top of feeds is clickbait. Networks are optimized for engagement, and clickbait is the best way to engage people. Poking into any emotional triggers by posting selfies, or charity cases, or causing flame wars, invoking dramatical scenes, or call to actions such as “comment and repost to get a free PDF” are what I have in mind.
- I’ve been recording 3% to 7% of impressions for my content compared to my total number of followers or subscribers. What’s the point of building a network if content doesn’t reach the audience?
- As a follow up, this also indicates a massive number of inactive accounts and bots.
And that’s not all.
I’ve been withdrawing from social for a while now – ever since the pandemic ended, and reach started to dip.
And the very problem with social media is that millions of people have done the same.
I haven’t evaporated on social. On the contrary, I post daily!
- But I schedule content, sometimes weeks ahead of time. Across a handful of networks – including Threads or Instagram.
- I have virtual assistants uploading carousels on Instagram or cross-posting my videos on TikTok or other networks.
- I post, and engage on my content, but don’t really scroll through feeds a whole lot.
- I’m tired of seeing clickbait and 5 of the same accounts on top of my feed while following thousands or even tens of thousands of people.
- I maintain a curated list – Lists on X and Aware lists on LinkedIn – with people I care about and want to follow and keep track of. I also use Dex as a CRM for LinkedIn for follow ups with accounts on the platform.
- Using Texts as a global messenger so I can DM across all platforms (and not remember where I chat with people – whether it’s WhatsApp, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or anything else.
Add that to the list of social media agencies scheduling content for accounts; global brands and celebrities posting (but not engaging), PR firms managing celebrity accounts (your favorite actor won’t even see your reply).
To summarize:
- Reach is abysmal – social networks only display what they want to, when they want to
- It’s as random as it gets – following posting hours and content formats is how you “hack” it, which normal people don’t do (it’s unnatural)
- Certain topics get shadow banned – this is censorship on the platform
- Links get penalized ALWAYS. We see that Blue Sky is doing better, but not dramatically so
What regular people want to do on social network – especially in a professional context (vs. watching cat memes and stupid reels) is:
- Primarily see content from accounts they follow (why follow otherwise?) vs. a third of the feed with tons of external recommendations and reposts.
- Get their content seen by people subscribed to them. What we see today is how Facebook killed the organic feed in 2014 – over a decade ago! Businesses were paying millions to get likes to their pages to build audiences and nurture them. Facebook pulled the rug from within and made all that reach obsolete.
- Get access to quality content by people they follow and care about – and explore some more, but NOT THROUGH VIRAL CLICKS AND HOOKS.
Even online “celebrities” and influencers are having a hard time monetizing that reach, because this amplified reach is now fake or inflated thanks to pods and bots, and reaching people who don’t want to pay for viral content. Likes don’t convert into revenue.
It’s been getting worse over the past decade, but with AI in play, it’s now trivial to mass-produce content for dozens of bot-controlled accounts in minutes, including DALL-E or Midjourney images, and even Sora or Runway videos today.
This includes automated commenting. Which is what viral accounts see – they bubble up as they are on certain lists that bots use to leach reach – commenting so their profiles are seen, so they get extra followers.
In 2023, Meta even announced publicly fake accounts they manage as chatbots, with fake personas and content living on Facebook and Instagram:
If you feel that AI will disappear, it won’t. The number of bot-controlled accounts is going up daily. More and more online traffic isn’t ran by humans.
So let’s take this a step back.
Social networks only care about keeping people online on their proprietary platforms. This is why they limit reach out to external links, introduce the video format, keep engagement and dopamine high (leading to more scrolling and more ad impressions).
Networks couldn’t care less about the user real interests. It’s engagement they crave.
Gaming companies, casinos, adult sites don’t care about the well-being of their users. They care about clicks, ads, and subscriptions.
Don’t mistakenly believe that social media is around to keep you educated, smarter, calmer. Endorphine, dopamine, and other triggers and boosts enable companies to rake views.
Connecting with people (keeping in touch), learning (educational content), and distributing your content (external links) are all disallowed under the hood.
While distribution is vastly impaired today for the same reason – not just social, but organic search and AI chatbots, with AI content and email cold blasts, this doesn’t make social networks any better. While it’s technically possible to “fix” them by improving the feed, this would lead to short-term revenue loss, forecasted 6 to 12 months while people calibrate and start to use social networks as originally anticipated. Since companies are traded publicly and investors don’t like dips, it’s very unlikely to happen.
Moral of the story? Social is degrading and self-destructing itself. Millions of smart people are automating and scheduling content just so they stick around, and keep an eye on replies on their phones in case they get a memo, but won’t scroll or see or engage with your content. Treat this as a reminder that relationship building in 2025 is nothing like 2021 unless you’re in the influencer space living the viral clickbait game (which is very hard to monetize unless you sell ads, sponsored posts, ghostwriting or similar services to others chasing views and likes).
