MACHINE VISION 026: Social Media Wonkery

ATTENTION CONSERVATION NOTICE: this letter is all about social media stuff, vague stabs at gaming algo and studying audiences. May be very dull. No shame in deleting now.

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Some social media notes:

Facebook continue to tune their algo systems for Pages.

Reach and engagement on my Official Page Thing, which were already bad, took a steep hit from the new algo tweak. At this point, I essentially wrote off Facebook in terms of reach strategy. I decided instead to give the algo what it wanted, in a manner of speaking.

I killed the crossposters that placed my warrenellis.com and my warrenellis.tumblr posts on my Facebook Page. Also unhooked Vimeo and YouTube. The only thing that crossposts there now is my Instagram account.

I then used Buffer to store up and post a shitload of my old Tweets. I think they post at a rate of one every twelve hours. So three minutes' work creates around a week's worth of Facebook Page posts. But, to the algo, it looks like an actual fresh post every time, because it's nothing but text entered into an update box and then timeshifted. So now look.

What seems to happen here is this: the algo favours the illusion of actual new keystrokes happening in a status update box on a Facebook Page. Which is fair enough. It reads crossposts as noise, filters them out and then punishes the page with an automatic reduction in its reach. The same probably applies to very frequent posts. I suspect that frequent linking may also be something the algo looks for. If I'm constantly asking people to click *out* of Facebook, they might code to minimise the visibility of such treasonous behavior. It's a thought. Could be wrong.

Anyway. There's a beginning of an approach towards ways to make Facebook Pages work a little better. Anything that's a crosspost is reaching maybe 1000 people. The simple short plaintext posts repurposed from my Twitter archive are reaching between 2500 and 3500 people. Which is obviously not great, but an order of magnitude over what I was getting before. I still consider Facebook Pages a dead loss overall, but it was an interesting five minutes' work to set up an experiment and check the results a while later...!

If there's a lesson to be had from this, it's simply Less Is More, On Facebook Pages, Because If Facebook See You They Will Kill You.

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Tumblr, though... that's something else. I felt like I was having trouble getting traction on Tumblr, and was talking about this with a friend. She showed me the most popular Tumblr she follows, and said, "look at how she does it."

She's posting every twenty minutes. That's one less post per hour than fucking Gawker generates. Amazing.

I set my Tumblr queue to autopost six times a day instead of four. Added five hundred readers in a week.

This is all just experimentation and seeing what it's like out there right now, you understand. The world's not going to end if I am not annoyingly omnipresent. And that's not going to happen anyway. But it's interesting to me, to see who goes where, and to see what services reward and tune out. (You would, perhaps, be surprised to hear that, upon being told I was killing the crossposters on the FB Page, some users fairly screamed that they did not use or understand or like Twitter or Tumblr, and resented even the idea that they might have to use other services, let *alone* visit a blog. One guy even said I was "shooting myself in the foot" by taking some content away from Facebook. Content that he, of course, could not see most of, because FB was hiding it from him. But still. I used to joke that Tumblr is the new LiveJournal, but in terms of aggressively defending their walled garden, I may have had it wrong. Tumblr users want what they want, but the hardcore FB users who spoke to me did not want to go outside. The other month, in Brighton, Rebekka Kill said that "Twitter is punk and Facebook is disco." At the time, I laughed, but...

Our next instalment will probably have to talk about how I don't seem to have the strength to update my own website any more. But that can wait until after I get a thousand words of book written.

And now I'm timeshifting this to autopost out to you on Wednesday at 4pm UK time!

-- W