Narcissism At The Heart Of Social Media...

Before you get your undies & panties in a bunch, hear me out... ??

From this perspective, I'm taking the stance that the narcism is in the platforms themselves, not necessarily the users. So, you can stop holding your breath now, this article isn't about you!

However, we as users of these platforms don't realize that we feed into the need of these platforms to be pumped up by its users.

In this article, because we are here, I'm going to be directly dealing with LinkedIn but I will mention the other platforms that this is very evident and prevalent in.

The main reason for this narcism is first and foremost the fact that they are in business to make money. How does a business that sells no products itself make money... It provides services that the users can purchase for the upgrades.

Facebook has put 95% of its efforts into its marketing platform. Hands down, it is an equal and rival only to Google (Ads & Youtube) especially with its acquisitions of Instagram & WhatsApp.

"Wayne, that's silly, its just business."

Perhaps you may be right, but when you take a closer look, how right are you? Yes, it is their business to serve their shareholders first. And they do that well with their very robust (my favorite) marketing platform. But when you dig a little deeper, you discover that they are ONLY into themselves.

Facebook Ads is one example. They want to keep people on their platform for as long as possible. Why? Because the longer you stay on the more likely you are to click on an ad, and they can make more money. Not only this but Facebook rewards you when using their ad platform form keeping people on or near Facebook and the penalize you when you take people away from Facebook.

They are all about the USER EXPERIENCE,

not necessarily the social one... So if you have a blog, article, website or sales page that your ad directs people to, you'll be "penalized" with higher ad costs. Why, because you are taking them AWAY from Facebook.

However, if you say, do a live FB video and you turn that video into an ad, or you host an event through FB and run an ad to it, guess what, that video will get a view for sometimes as low as $0.01 per view or that event ad will cost only pennies per conversion.

Why is that? You guessed it!

Because you are KEEPING their audience on FB longer they allow you to show your content for a lot less. There are several ways to exploit Facebook's narcissism, but this was just ONE of the many examples that could be discussed here.

Now the funny thing in the difference in Facebook & LinkedIn is that Facebook doesn't like to be mentioned by its users in its advertising (I think its a copyright issue). It also recently cut out the organic reach of its business pages from its algorithm and directed it more towards its ads platform and social environment within the news feed (Which will be going away soon so I've heard).

This is where we see Facebook promoting with its algo, posts & people who share lots of content about Facebook. And when a post has lots of reactions, comments & shares, Facebook makes that post available to more people. This is where LinkedIn has copied its approach and how it works it's algo too.

LinkedIn is still like the wild wild west of social media platforms.

Though it has been around for a long time, it's just getting its footing as a viable social platform where people actually want to engage with one another and now is becoming a haven for creators to express themselves. Probably because it is supposed to be a "professional social media platform." In my experience, it's just a social media platform that professionals use while they are at work... hahaha

Now we're getting to the meat of the matter and that is the fact that if you want to be successful on Linkedin, you have to create content about LinkedIn.

Yup, I said it! In fact, if you go to any platform, one of it's biggest hashtags (the ones that actually use them) is usually its own name. So on Instagram for instance #Instagram & #Instagrammers combined have about 90 Million followers alone.

The same goes for LinkedIn. There are a few variations here as well like #Linkedin, #LinkedinFamily & #LinkedinFam. There are millions of people using this platform that follow those hashtags. (hashtags are another post)

So after conducting my own research, I've discovered that the algorithm likes to hear its own name. It likes to be talked about and will do whatever it can to make sure as many people who are using the platform are creating and engaging on content about it. They want its users to stay here and not go to other platforms. They are ALL self-serving in this way.

So what are you going to do about it?

Connect with me, I'd love to have a conversation about this topic! Until Next Time!

Wayne Jr