You’ve grown your followers, planned content ahead of time and consistently posted on social media platforms. So why does it seem like your social media posts are reaching fewer and fewer people every day?
It’s a frustrating situation for marketers who put extra elbow grease into building a social media presence. But before you begin to think that social media is dead, dive into how users are discovering and consuming content today. Following an account is only one part of what shapes a person’s feed. Social media platforms take into account people’s interests and interactions to influence what they see. This change creates both a challenge and an opportunity for brands.
So what has changed and how can you adapt your strategy to reach your audience?
From Social Graphs to Interest Graphs
The social media that you grew up using or first encountered as a marketer was built around a concept called the “social graph”: the connections between people and accounts. Social media platforms showed content on feeds according to the accounts, pages, and people that a person chose to follow. If someone did not follow your account, they were less likely to see your content unless it was reshared by a mutual connection. This caused brands to put a stronger emphasis on growing their follower counts.
In today’s social media age, follower count alone cannot tell you what content will appear on users’ feeds. Algorithms now rely on a user’s interests, social media habits, and interactions to show new content from accounts they don’t follow but would be interested in. This recommendation-based model is known as the “interest graph.” Social media itself did not die, but the way that people consume content has changed. Connections and interests both still shape feeds.
Interest-based discovery existed before TikTok. Pinterest, for example, introduced Guided Search in 2014 to help people explore ideas around topics like travel, food and home décor. TikTok’s For You feed offers another example of how people discover content beyond their existing connections.
Other social media platforms use recommendation-based algorithms, too! Instagram suggests posts and Reels that a user might be interested in. YouTube recommends videos based on a user’s viewing behavior and LinkedIn surfaces posts beyond a user’s professional network.
For instance, Meta has shared that Instagram does not rely on just one algorithm to power its platform. It has separate algorithms for each of the areas people use, like the main home feed, Reels, Stories and the Explore page.
The reason behind using different algorithms is that people use these spaces differently. For example, Stories can help people keep up with familiar accounts, while Explore helps them discover new content. Instagram organizes users’ feeds by prioritizing the content they are more likely to enjoy based on their past behavior on Instagram. It ranks content based on a person’s engagement activity, interactions between accounts, information about the post and how people interact with the post.
Followers Are Only Part of the Story
Your page’s follower growth is still valuable to take into account. It demonstrates that people have a connection with the account. However, it cannot tell you whether those people can see or interact with content regularly, thanks to the new way that social media works.
Knowing this distinction matters for brands when it comes to planning their next posts. A company announcement or product launch may be important to an organization, but its importance may not be obvious to someone who’s scrolling through a LinkedIn feed.
A webinar registration deadline, new resource or upcoming program needs context. Why should your audience care? What will they learn? Which problem will it help them solve?
In a world of constant content across feeds, the post doesn’t need to be dramatic. It does, however, need to make sure the benefit is clear early enough for readers to recognize its relevance.
Before your team publishes something, ask yourself these useful questions to make sure the content meets this need:
- Who’s the target audience for this post?
- Will someone who doesn’t know your organization be able to make sense of what you’re saying?
- What should the person reading your post take away from it?
These questions help move content planning beyond what an organization wants to publish toward what its audience needs, which is a must in today’s social media environment.
One Idea Can Take Different Forms
With so many social media channels available now, it can be easy for organizations to share the same posts across all social media platforms. This can be a mistake in an organization’s social media strategy. Your campaigns should have one central message, but how you express it should fit each platform.
The starting point of campaigns should be your own audience. Researching your audience’s demographics and behavior—like who mostly follows each of your social media accounts, which posts they interact with the most and how they use those platforms—can give you a glimpse into what your particular community finds useful.
Adding another platform should only be considered if your audience is there and your organization’s or business’s content will be useful to them.
Measure What the Content Accomplishes
Learning what type of content to post is just one of the ingredients for a successful social media strategy. Another key ingredient is learning which metrics to measure to help improve your content. Views, likes and follower counts are easy to notice, but they answer different questions.
Measuring a post’s reach can show you how widely your content is being seen. The engagement on the post reveals how social media users respond to your post. The number of website visits or registrations can demonstrate whether the content met your company’s objective.
Which metrics are most useful to your organization depends on what the goal of your post was. Was it trying to make a sale? Fill up seats? Or share the news?
If you are trying to share an educational resource, then consider tracking saves, shares and visits to the resource. For a webinar campaign, track registrations. A community engagement post could be measured by the responses and conversations it generates with social media users.
Another ingredient for a successful social media strategy is looking at the performance of your old posts. See which topics and content formats your audience is responding to the most. Taking note of what your audience likes can make it easier to plan successful posts in the future.
Build a Strategy That Can Adapt
At the end of the day, you cannot control the next social media update. But what you can do is adapt to the change without losing the brand’s mission. You should create a process that helps you respond more thoughtfully. Here are four practices you should use:
- Consider making recurring themes. Creating a series, starting online discussions or giving expert perspectives can help people understand what they can expect from an account. Plus, it can keep them coming back and help them remember your brand.
- Test, test and test. The only way you will know if a type of content works with your specific audience or target audience is if you try. Change something in your content, look at the results and see what you learn. It could help you improve your content or learn what to avoid.
- Make the next steps clear. When appropriate, don’t forget to give people a clear call to action (CTA). Help people find a product, subscribe to a newsletter or register for a webinar. Make that step relevant to the content rather than attaching the same call to action to every post.
- Don’t forget about social listening. You want to review the questions and feedback your audience gives you, which could reveal gaps and help fuel your next content ideas.
What Comes Next for Marketers?
Social media continues to offer an opportunity for brands to get discovered, educate and build relationships with their target audience. Your next step is to examine what audiences are responding to, adapt content thoughtfully and review those posts to improve future work. The key to having a successful social media recipe in today’s age is learning why someone chooses to watch, share or follow.
