Your algorithm is who you are

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I’ve shared on here many times that I’m not a big fan of algorithms in social media and search and what they’re doing to us. However, even if you don’t follow my lead with things like Bluesky and RSS, there are things you can do to help fix the algorithms that you see.

As shared in a recent podcast, Gary Vaynerchuk says this (paraphrased):

“Go into Instagram or whatever app you like to use, search for things like happiness, joy and kindness. When the results come up, go click Like on hundreds of them, and leave kind comments on dozens of them. When you wake up tomorrow, you’ll have an entirely new feed.”

Social media algorithms can do bad things, and you should work to avoid them as much as you can, but they largely shape the feed that your actions have led to.

Do you want a better feed? Change your actions.

Screenshots continue to be lazy and problematic

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I’ve mentioned for years that the trend of sharing screenshots of articles (instead of links to the article) is very problematic, and I recently saw the perfect example.

I saw an article being shared around on Facebook that only had this screenshot for reference:

In one case, I saw over 10,000 comments on the article, with the overwhelming majority coming from people who were absolutely sure that it was caused by the COVID vaccine. Here is a quick slice of some of them:

Without even getting into the science of vaccines, all of these people are 100% wrong — because they didn’t bother to find the article before commenting.

Why?

If you do a simple Google search to see what this study was about, you quickly find this line:

The study, led by the University of Melbourne, analysed government data on all diagnoses of bowel cancer (also known as colorectal cancer) in Australia from 1990-2020.

In other words, the study was over before the first COVID vaccine was released, and therefore it is impossible for the vaccine to have caused a single case of cancer in the study.

Yet the majority of the 10,000 people that commented on this post were completely confident that vaccines caused these cancers, despite having zero medical correlation and despite the very study they were referencing making it quite impossible to be true. This could have been solved if any of those commenters took the time to read what they were responding to.

Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?

It reminds me of the 2014 April Fool’s prank from NPR where they shared a link on social media that asked “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” that led to this page. Of course, most of the comments on social media were strong opinions about reading without having clicked to actually do the reading.

It’s similar to how Marjorie Taylor Greene recently voted on the “Big Beautiful Bill” without reading it, and now she’s very upset at what she voted for. Reading is important.

While there is no excuse for making such arrogant and condescending comments without doing the most basic bit of research, Facebook is partly to blame as well. Facebook, along with most other social platforms, greatly discourages users from adding links to posts. Some data shows that adding a link to your post can cut engagement by up to 90%!

If the person that shared this story had shared a proper link instead of an image, it wouldn’t have traveled anywhere near as far.

At the end of the day, links or no links (and with fake AI stuff becoming more common), I encourage you to always take a moment to find and read what you’re about to leave a comment on.

Customers make a list of brands before they research, and most of them buy from that list

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It’s well-established that most customers make a list of vendors and do some degree of research before they make a purchase, so the traditional best practices make sense: have quality content, answer questions, and be a guide as customers are doing their research.

However, prior to that research, 80-90% of customers have a short list of vendors in mind already, and 90% of those people end up purchasing from one of those vendors! In short, if you’re not in your buyer’s mind before they start their research, you have no chance with more than 75% of your potential customers. You can find some detail on that in this great article from the Harvard Business Review.

So how do you get into their mind before the research? Spend time in the same places as them online.

Rand Fishkin recently put out a great (short!) video that walks through this, and you can check it out here.

Ultimately, you need to be present on podcasts that they listen to, on social media sites they frequent, in videos that they may want to watch, in blog posts that provide information, and in email newsletters that they consume.

The best part about this kind of work is that it’s a win-win-win:

  • You show up where they already are.
  • You’ve providing content and value to help them for the decision ahead.
  • Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) will eat up that content of yours and make it more likely that you’ll show up there too!

So much of marketing these days involves simply staying top of mind. When a customer is making a list of vendors like yours to consider, make sure you’re already one that they’ve thought of before or else you’ll never even have a chance.

Social Media is becoming Interest Media

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The nature of social media is undergoing a huge change. All of the major social networks are changing to show you less content from those you follow and more posts that they think will interest you. This has worked wonders for the growth of TikTok, and we’ll see how it does for the rest.

In a recent podcast, Gary Vaynerchuk summarized it well, saying:

I believe we’re no longer in the era of social media but in the era of interest media. Social was like “who are your friends?” and now it’s “what are you interested in?”.

There are good things and bad things about this, but the main thing is to simply accept that it’s happening. Unless you control the algorithm at Meta or something, you can’t change where this shift is heading.

The main takeaway is this: instead of focusing on building the number of followers that you have, focus instead of producing amazing content. The goal of creating amazing content should have always been a high priority, but it’s the only priority these days. It was nearly a year ago that I shared how the value of your “followers” was dropping quickly, and that trend has continued. Getting more followers isn’t a bad thing, but it’s simply not nearly as valuable as it was a few years ago.

You no longer need a “big spark” to have a chance to go viral. Your next post (or even your first post) on social media has the potential to be seen by millions. Make awesome content that attracts interest and you’ll tend to do very well.

Jab, Jab, Jab

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12 years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk wrote an excellent book called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook“. The idea was pretty simple: your social media content should consist primarily of “jabs”, where you’re sharing value-added content to make life better for your followers, with just the occasional “right hook” thrown in with your call-to-action.

Lately, it seems most people are either all jabs or all right hooks.

All Jabs

All jabs isn’t a bad place to be. If you’re solely providing great content to your followers, you’ll end up in a great place. That’s essentially how we ended up as clients of the CPA firm that we use, and we essentially produce content the same way.

All Right Hooks

The problem I’m seeing is too many right hooks. No jabs, just sales. There are the pure spammers of course, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. These are all people I know, that have chosen not to engage in any meaningful way online, and only show up when they need something.

For example, here’s I guy I know that I hadn’t talked to in a while. I reached out to see how he was doing, and he never replied, but four months later he reached out to me with a direct pitch.

Another friend has literally never posted on LinkedIn, and their first (and only!) post was looking for a job. That’s understandable, but should be followed up with other content that might be useful for potential employers. Instead, it’s just the one post on their feed and nothing else. I suspect it won’t go well.

A different friend has taken a similar tact. I know they’ve been struggling to get clients for their solo practice, and yet his last two posts have been:

  • 5 months ago: “I’m looking for work”
  • 1 year ago: “Here’s why you should hire me”

There are no posts showing his viewpoints, or tech stories that interest him, or resources for others to use. There is nothing that shows anyone why you would actually want to hire him.

Jabs Win

Social media isn’t the answer for everything, for sure, but if you’re going to spend a little time to post on there, throw a few jabs while you’re logged in.

I point people to the CPA firm that we use quite often because they do it right. Here are Jason’s last six posts on LinkedIn as of the time I’m building this post:

  • Shared a recent podcast episode of theirs.
  • Shared an episode from a different podcast of theirs.
  • Shared a recent post from Gary Vaynerchuk about having purpose in your work.
  • Shared a bit about their firm.
  • Shared a tax reminder for small businesses.
  • Shared a helpful product that one of their clients is offering to litigators.

He throws in some soft Right Hooks from time to time, but I love following his content because of the great insights and resources that he shares.

Throw an occasional Right Hook from time to time if you want, but pepper the internet with Jabs and things will tend to work out great for you!

We control the means of production

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For nearly all of human history, a select few controlled the means of production. A handful of people owned the factories, the facilities, and the raw materials, and there wasn’t much that the other people could do about it.

Thankfully, we’re a place now where that’s no longer true. The device that you’re reading this on has all of the capability that anyone else on the planet has; you can can capture images, write content, create videos, and do more than people could have imagined just a few decades ago.

Some people choose not to take advantage of it. From his book “Linchpin“, Seth Godin explains his frustration with folks like that:

“I’m always amazed when I meet a writer who can’t use a computer, or a lawyer who’s uncomfortable with LexisNexis, or an executive who needs a corporate IT person to help him navigate an e-mail system.”

Or put more succinctly:

“The world just gave you control over the means of production. Not to master them is a sin.”

The counter to this idea is to say “No, we don’t. Google controls the search engine, Facebook controls social media, and we’re just cogs in their systems.” It’s not wrong, but it’s a lazy argument.

You can own your content and own the algorithms. There is a good chance that you’re reading this because you’ve subscribed to get these posts by email. There’s no search engine, no social media, and no algorithms involved. I own the site and I own the email list, and it costs essentially nothing for both of them.

You can choose to ignore the technology like Seth shared, or you can give up because “they” control everything, or you can just grab control for yourself. The means of production are in your hands, so use them.

A minute on the internet in 2024

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As they’ve done for 12 years now (and we discussed last year), the folks at Domo have created a fascinating infographic that shows just how much time people are spending online. Their full write-up is here, and the main image can be seen below:

Some things that I noticed, that happen every minute of every day:

  • Netflix users stream 362,962 hours of content. That’s over 190 trillion hours of content watched per year or over 21 million years of content. Wow!
  • Google’s Gemini receives 8,574 visitors per minute, which seems high until you compare it to Google Search (with 5.9M visitors) or even LinkedIn (with 9,000 job applications per minute).
  • One of the biggest numbers was 138.9M Reels played on Facebook and Instagram every minute — that’s over 73 trillion views per year.
  • The other one that jumped out was that people stream video of other people playing Fortnite at a clip of 1,563 hours per minute, or more than a trillion hours per year. I knew that game streaming platforms like Twitch were popular, but that was a shockingly large number.

I encourage you to check out the full article on the Domo site for more.

What jumped out the most for you?

Customers are mostly done with their research before they even reach out to you

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It’s fun to build a website and think about all of the people that will come to your site to do their research about your product. It certainly happens, but it’s far less often than you might think.

In Kara Smith Brown’s book “The Revenue Engine” she shares this bit of data about B2B buyers:

“Seventy-four percent of B2B buyers have done more than half their research online before they ever talk to a seller.”

That’s a huge number! 3/4 of your customers have already done more than half of their research before they reach out to you, so their decision is often made before you have a chance to say a word. Some of them may have gotten info from your website, but many did it via third-party sources like LinkedIn, ChatGPT or Reddit.

This ties back to the idea of branded searches continuing to rise on Google. Consumers are researching on their own, and then looking you up on Google once they see you as a solid choice.

You need to have a fantastic website and deep knowledge of your industry, for sure, but if you’re not finding ways to be seen across the entire internet you’ll never get the chance to talk to your prospective buyers because they’ll have already gone somewhere else.

The incentives of the media have flipped

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I’ve long heard people (including myself) long for the days of the “old” media, where you had broadcasters like Walter Cronkite that were less biased than the media today. It seems to be true, and the problem today is one of incentives.

Years ago, it was in the interest of media outlets to stay in the center and be a reliable source of information. Everything was vanilla because there weren’t many choices; if a news anchor drifted too far toward an edge, it’d be troublesome.

Today it’s the opposite, with millions of options to choose from. People are seemingly forced to pick a side and those that try to remain moderate get squashed. Being extreme (on either end) is where the audience and the money lies.

In a recent episode of Seth Godin’s “Akimbo” podcast, Seth laid it out like this:

And so you’ve got anti-vaxxers who are actually hurting the lives of children, putting stuff up on Facebook with no actual scientific proof about what they’re saying. But because it touches a nerve and because it’s easy to spread, they get a bigger audience. And there’s little or no incentive for them to become conservative about their point of view because the more extreme they make it, the more of an audience they get.

And so if we are chasing popularity or chasing monetization, the pressure has flipped. It has flipped from being a reliable curator who doesn’t take payola, who is very careful about what they are picking because they want a reputation for being careful about what they’re picking, to a different environment. Amazon did the same thing with the Kindle.

The lack of moderate viewpoints is becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and it’s not an easy fix. Social media algorithms reward extreme content, which makes it tough to solve. My two hopes:

Whether you like Bluesky or not, I hope that their approach will do good things for our future. Are you on there yet?

Branded searches are taking over Google

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As time has gone on, and our search engine patterns have changed, a big new trend is beginning to emerge: people are using Google for branded searches more than ever before.

Put another way, people are searching for “Nike” instead of “best running shoes”, or “GreenMellen” instead of “web design companies in Atlanta”. People are doing their research elsewhere, generally on social media or in AI tools, and then using Google to take them to the company site.

SparkToro‘s Rand Fishkin recently shared some amazing data in this LinkedIn post, culminating in this image:

So what does this mean?

More than ever before your company needs to be the answer, not an answer. You need to be active in social media, you need to be showing up in AI answers, and you need to be showing your expertise to your prospective clients. Once they see how great you are, then they’ll head over to Google and find your website.

(and make sure your website doesn’t disappoint)

There are certainly still some people that search for “best running shoes” and “web design companies in Atlanta” on Google, but those numbers are fading. If you rely on that kind of traffic, the next few years could get pretty rough for you. Take the time now to build your entire presence, and reap the rewards when people head over to Google to find you by name.