The promise of ‘organic reach’ on social media was always about building sustained interaction with a community of people for whom your work had relevance. The algorithm could be used effectively to facilitate this by helping people find content that resonated with them which enabled them to connect with content creators who reliably produced this kind of content. It wasn’t problem free (to put it mildly) but it enable something like publics to emerge on social platforms, as Lambros Fatsis and I argued in The Public and their Platforms.
What we’re now seeing is a prioritisation of engagement across the platform which means identifying the content with the greatest propensity to circulate. The connection with particular creators can be an obstacle to this because it means familiar content can crowd out content which might circulate more widely. In the case of the recent Instagram update this manifests in prioritising share rates over other markers of engagement with content. This effectively deprioritises engagement from existing audiences relative to new users from outside the network. It’s not impossible this could lead some audiences to grow but it’s more likely to incentivise the production of viral content while disincentivising content that cements the relationship between creators and community.
It’s another instance of all social media becoming like TikTok. The promise of social media made in the early 2010s is pretty much entirely gone by this point. I wonder when, or if, higher education will catch up. It’s still a necessary for professional marketing and I fully recognise many people enjoy it at least some of the time. But if you’re using it for narrowly professional purposes and you can choose not to, I’d strongly encourage you to give up at this stage.
Mark Carrigan 