The Game of Algos | When Social Media Matters (And When It Doesn't)

13.

That’s how young I was when I first entered the big, bad world of social media.

Unlike my friends (who legendarily bluffed their ages and got their accounts at 11-and-a-half), I waited patiently till my 13th birthday to start my Facebook account.

(13-year-old Chitra had some odd principles like that, something which 25-year-old Chitra completely empathizes with, still)

Of course, nobody in my family was pleased. At all. For a year, my relatives kept telling my mom how irresponsible it was, for me, to get a social media account. Heck, my mom’s best friend’s NRI cousin was judging my mom for letting me use Facebook at such a young age.

It was as if… they thought that the big, bad world of Facebook could corrupt my na?ve little soul.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, my na?ve little soul was also quite the nerdy little soul. All the nerdy cells in my body somehow helped me avoid:

• tYpInG sEnTencEs lIkE tHiS
• Lining my eyes with kohl in such a way that I could look like a homeless racoon and posting selfies of myself with the said racoon eyes
• Indulge in content that could be violent for my mental health (or corrupt my South Indian sensibilities)

Yet, I… just loved the world of social media.

I loved posting every other day. I loved sharing what I felt. And somehow, by sharing my experiences, I felt that I could interact and connect with way more people than I ever could in person. I felt like, through that medium of expression, I was growing more comfortable in my skin, to express myself and understand what I truly felt.

In that virtual world, I felt at home.

But then there was a flipside to it.

My teenage-self started judging herself by numbers.

The number of people who liked a photo that I’d uploaded. The number of people who commented on a poem that I’d written on Wattpad. The number of people who clicked on my blog. And it went on and on.

Somehow, subconsciously, that was all I could think of. And the higher the numbers, the higher would be the validation I’d get.

I’m sure, I’m not the only one.

I’m sure, even you (or someone you know), would have, at some point gotten swayed by the number game. Anybody who doesn’t have the wisdom of a saint would be swayed. It’s human to feel that way.

For me, this number game obsession reached a peak when I turned 22.

Every other day, I’d see people on my Instagram – posting about their oh-so-spectacular lives. Some would put funky photos of the trips they’d take (and I’d sadly reminisce all the short trips I’d taken with my friends back in the Young India Fellowship ). Some would put up dance videos with their BFFs (and I’d bemoan the fact that with my awful dancing skills, I made Ananya Panday look like Madhuri Dixit-esque). And some would put up pictures of their newly minted fiancés.

And I’d find myself moping, “Why do their lives look so much cooler than mine?” ?

It magnified all the more when the lockdown hit. I got an unnaturally extra amount of time with my social media. Before I’d know it, I’d embark on a doom-scrolling spree. And judge myself for not being cool enough.

It was way worse than school. Back in school, I deeply didn’t care whether I was cool or not.

With social media in early 2020, though? As a 22-year-old just out of college, I felt like I was a dweeb for putting up lame content when everybody else looked so much cooler.

But luckily, that all changed. And it was all thanks to my work.

During mid-2020, I started actively curating social media reports for one of the brands that my team was working on.

Social media reporting was fun - it's taught me an unbelievable amount of things about each social media platform. By analyzing the trends and insights, it made me understand what really clicked and what we needed to do to improve our brand's content.

Yet more than anything else, social media reporting and analysis completely squashed my insecurities and made me see social media –

From a much more clinical lens.

Finally, I realized that social media wasn’t a vicious cycle out to get me and tell me that I'm the lamest human being on this planet and I make a sloth.

Social media, at the end of the day, was nothing but a wild game of algos.

And while I’m still a rookie when it comes to navigating the chaotic realm of social media, here are some of my takeaways: ?

Takeaway #1: The elusive engagement rate

From a myopic lens, we think that someone has a good social media profile if they:

• Have a high number of followers.
• High number of likes per post.

But there’s one secret ingredient that not many know of.

It’s called the engagement rate.

To put it very simply, it’s the percentage of your followers who actively engaged with a post you put out.

Of course, for each social media channel, there’s a different way to compute it. Some, like Facebook, give it to you automatically on their Insights tool. Some, like Instagram, force you to manually sit in front of an excel sheet and fill in the likes, comments, and shares. And then use the miracle that's the excel formula to compute it.

But ultimately, engagement rate a solid measure for businesses to have – for it makes them realize how effective their social media content is and how relevant (or irrelevant) it can be for their conversion rates.

If you are a content creator too, this is a far more effective measure to realize how relevant you are, instead of buying followers on a spree to show how ‘effective’ your content is for your followers.

(Buying followers is a very stupid activity, that quite a few of my socialite-esque acquaintances and past batchmates are indulging in. They think buying followers is the perfect way to show popular they are on social media – when the truth is, their actual engagement rate can be super-duper low and no one really gives a damn about their pouty-discount-Kardashian-esque lifestyle)

Takeaway #2: The newer features you use, the greater is the response you get

Given how dynamic social media is, every other day, you see social media apps come up with new features.

For instance, carousels in LinkedIn were quite the success story. For one of the key brands I’d worked on, I started creating carousels.

Why? Because they were hitting an all-time high engagement rate of 36% - which was… 4 times the average engagement rate. I think, even today, carousels are doing pretty well.

Now, onto a more personal front, we have Instagram Reels. I think it was around 2021 when reels hit big time. Especially in India, thanks to the TikTok ban, reels became Instagram’s go-to new feature.

And so, Instagram promoted reels aggressively. So, there was a point (there still is a point), when you’d get more reactions and likes when you posted a reel, instead of a post.

I’ve shamelessly capitalized on it too. For a huge chunk of 2021 (and even now, at 2023), I create reels of all my writing work on my writing account @thatswhatarchiesays. You can check it out here

It's not just me. Using these new features, businesses and creators, too, can expand their market by a huge margin. One just has to be super smart to understand what new feature works and what doesn't.

Takeaway #3: Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s the social media platform you’re posting on

I don’t know if you noticed it but:

• Have you compared the number of likes that you receive on your personal Instagram now versus a year or two ago? Chances are that your likes now would be much lower than before.
• Have you noticed that you’d see some posts that were posted days ago, right now?

I’m sure, at first, you would’ve felt odd. Some of you, I’m sure, would’ve hidden your own post’s likes, feeling weird that you weren’t getting as many reactions as you were supposed to.

So, here’s the good news for you:

In 2022, across social media platforms, there were some significant changes. Especially on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, the algorithm changed in a way that – the day when you posted something didn’t matter. It would appear on someone’s feed in a (according to me) the most bizarre of ways. Which is still fine. Social media managers need to be super strategic about posting, though. You cannot just post anything on a whim, anymore.

On Instagram, though. It’s a different story.

It’s more of a make-or-break sort of a situation. If you post a photo that gets a lot of likes in a short span of time, your post gets pushed out to a wider audience, which in turn makes more people react to your content. For businesses, it’s great and it holds them more accountable, when it comes to the content they're posting.

But personally, I fail to understand why they’re using this same algorithm for personal accounts. It’s not something that I’m particularly in the favour of – because it lowkey makes something personal so business like and people will just end up posting what’s on trend, instead of posting posts that they truly want.

And it completely beats the whole point of Instagram.

Instagram, at the end of the day, was all about that personalized feel of Momentaufnahme . It wasn't just a tool for you to brand yourself as a

Ultimately, social media is the magical mayhem of the algorithms.

There’s nothing you can do to beat it. Except for consistently posting good quality content.

And, more than anything else though, while social media numbers are very crucial for businesses now-a-days, you must not use them to define your self-worth. Ever.

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What's more, if you have the patience of a saint, you can surely follow my podcast, Roaring 20s , on Spotify where I ramble about life as a 20-something-year-old in the 2020s.