It's the algorithms, stupid!

You have seen it happening on any social media platform, from Facebook to TikTok: organic views of anything you share, are rarely reaching more than 10% of your connections or 'friends' (for personal profiles), or 5% of your followers or 'fans' (for business pages), no matter how popular tags you may use. And most of those who see what you have to share, fall in one of two main classes: your close friends or relatives (for personal profiles), or your staff and people close to you (for business pages). Not exactly the kind of people you are looking to share your news, right?

The answer to why this happens, is right in front of your eyes. It may come in different flavors, depending on the platform, but it always boils down to this:

If you want most of your friends or followers to get to view your - otherwise organic - content, you need to pay. No matter how much effort or money you have spent to build your network on any social platform, the sad truth is that none of those platforms were intended to be social. Ever. 'Social' is simply a branding trick they use to get you to sign up, and start inviting your connections to follow you or your page - because you want to be social, right? Before that, platforms were using a different term to describe themselves: micro-blogging platforms - which means scaled-down versions of WordPress or Blogger.

This brings us to how the 'traditional' blogging platforms were getting their revenue: by showing banner ads to those who read the blog posts, usually at the end of each blog post. But banner ads have an issue: they look like ads. But us people do not like ads. And we have trained our brains not to pay attention to them, unless they are disguised to appear like normal content. Google was the first to discover this, with their search results ads: they disguised their ads to appear as normal search results - until they were forced by regulators to place those ads separately from the rest of the search results, and be marked as 'Sponsored'.

And since all social media platforms are simply micro-blogging platforms, they have taken the lesson from Google, and applied what they learned, on themselves: they disguised the ads they were showing to their audience - the audience their users brought to them - to appear like normal content, shared by other profiles, unrelated to the users reading their (formerly known as RSS) feeds.

There is an important difference though.

On 'traditional' blogging platforms, a user would have signed up to receive notifications from several blogs, (often less than 10), and bloggers would have posted once or twice per week. That would be 2-3 notifications per day, and even if another 2-3 notifications from other blogs were displayed in the feed, this was something easy to follow. But with several hundred profiles or pages posting on a daily basis - and quite a few, several times per day - users started getting each day, thousands of notifications in their feeds, just by those people or businesses they were following, driving available ad space to nearly zero.

So how could the so called 'social media' platforms could make space for ads? Simple! By limiting the number of posts users can see from people and pages they follow. That's how algorithms were born.

Algorithms are designed to make space for ads to show (the 'content' users don't want to see in their feeds) by limiting the number of posts shared by people and businesses (the content users do want to see in their feeds). Add to this that most people won't be scrolling their feeds forever - most people will stop scrolling after 20-30 posts in their feed, with at least 30% of those posts being ads - and you have the answer to the billion dollar question: your organic content is not reaching your connections or followers, because it was never designed that way - unless their total connections are under 50 (but nobody has just 50 connections in total, including pages followed).

If a random connection or follower of yours does not start scrolling on their feed right after you have posted your organic content, your chances for that content to be seen by that user are running slimmer each passing minute, until (3-24 hours later, depending on the algorithms on each platform) they drop to zero. And no, unlike 'traditional' blogging platforms, the vast majority of people will never get to your profile or page, to see what you have to share. Once it's gone from their feed, it's gone forever.

You see, the inconvenient truth no 'social media' platform wants you to know, is that the only thing social about them, is how the content they get to show to their users is created. Everything else is about how to get this content to be monetized the most. They are simply advertising platforms, looking to get as much as possible from the content they host. Every red cent counts! Even when it comes from those generating that content. If they could be generating more revenue by charging their users for simply posting content, rather than displaying ads, they would happily do it - and at least one of them is openly doing it already.

Now, picture this: someone is offering you a place to stay 'for free'. But the only thing you can really do for free, is just to sit or sleep on the floor. Everything else, from opening the window to locking the door, is costing you money. It doesn't sound like 'for free' very much, right?

Likewise, posting your content on the platforms costs nothing. But getting it to be shown to anyone else, other than a bunch of people close to you, costs you money - unless, of course, you don't mind your content to be visible almost by no other than just you. And if you try to find a workaround to show your content beyond those few people for free, you will not be allowed to use that workaround for long. At least, not for free.

What's worse, though, is that the platforms have convinced you that there is no other way to build your network, and show your content to your connections or followers. It's either their way, or the highway.

Here is some news for you: now there is a way - and a better one! It's not coming for free, but it will cost you pennies for the dollar the platforms charge you to have your content displayed to just a bunch of your followers. Because, unlike those platforms, we care for your content to be shown - if possible - to all of them. Your content; not somebody else's!

Break free from the platforms, by starting here.