Social Media Turns Us All Into Pavlov's Dogs

Very few of us have the luxury in our daily working lives of producing content, whether it be music, books, paintings, or technical articles, purely for the joy of creating. Although the creative drive may make you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard these days), ultimately the aim is to get what you produce in front of an appreciative audience.

And social media has provided a wonderful quick way to do so - although bands still drag their kit from dingy pub to dusty club in clapped-out vans in order to promote their songs and grow their fan base, and authors trudge from bookstore to bookstore on meeting-and-signing tours, the advent of social media allows for a remarkable "reach", all from the comfort of your laptop in a cosy coffee shop.

But there is a darker side to all of this.

The algorithm

It seems pretty clear that the formula for promoting content on a social media platform like LinkedIn (skip over it and the next paragraph if equations make you feel uncomfortable) is something along the lines of:

views = F * ( (A * likes) + (B * shares) + (C * comments) ) * W * T

where F is a format weighting (are we dealing with a video, an article, a post or a document), A and B and C are weightings to adjust the relative value of likes, shares and comments, W is proportional to the number of followers you have, and T is some kind of time based formula (quick responses to your content bump it onto more people's news feed more quickly than slow responses).

Obviously the actual algorithm is more complex and subtle, but everyone who is seriously engaged with social media has some kind of model similar to the above in their head, even if it's not articulated in symbols.

As a content producer you only have indirect control over the number of likes, shares and comments you get. You can encourage people to engage with you, and use all sorts of tricks to increase that engagement (sometime at the cost of your own authenticity and integrity), but ultimately the actions of your audience are out of your hands.

What you do have control over is the format of your content.

The format

Where it starts to get weird is when the social media platform tinkers with their algorithm, because it drives human behaviour in all sorts of unexpected ways.

For example, I use LinkedIn almost exclusively for my social media presence. I research blockchain and have a technical writing and academic background, so I started out by writing articles. However, I quickly noticed that a) articles take three to six hours to write and b) they only get hundreds of views. In the meantime I also noted that my news feed was full of videos. Now I'm not naturally the kind of person who wants to get in front of a camera, but I gave it a shot, and quickly found out that each time I submitted a post with a two to four minute video (which I could produce in less than 15 minutes) they got hundreds and then thousands of views.

So what's the point in writing articles?

I became a video blogger about blockchain. In the last year I have produced over 300 short videos on blockchain, Bitcoin, distributed ledgers, cryptography and other related topics.

(You can find them archived at www.youtube.com/thinklair if you are interested.)

The metrics

I never really thought about this radical shift in my behaviour. I'm a software geek who likes nothing more than hacking away at some code or drafting a patent application for an invention, and here I am - walking around the forests and lakes of Finland videoing myself while I talk. How did that happen?

However, in early September 2019, LinkedIn changed the format weightings. Less videos were appearing in my news feed, more articles and in particular more posts with attached documents started turning up instead. At the same time I realised that my own video view numbers were dropping, and more importantly, that profile views were dropping.

That's really significant. The profile views metric is the single best indicator of how widely your content is being distributed outside your group of followers. If your profile views drop, then your audience will be growing slower.

And the size of your following is equivalent in the social media world to the number of records you're selling in the music industry, or the number of copies of your book you are shifting in the publishing.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

Social media has conditioned me. Like Pavlov's dogs, who started salivating at the ringing of a bell simply because they were conditioned to the fact that a ringing bell means food will arrive soon, I have been doing stuff that I never would have otherwise, simply for the reward of seeing things like this:

For some reason it leaves me feeling ... well, not uncomfortable, but definitely out of sorts. Especially since my first reaction was to think about shifting back to image posts and document posts. I feel like I'm in a rock band, and due to changes in the taste of audiences I'm thinking about producing hip-hop or R'n'B.

Except that in this case it's not the audience that is causing the shift, it's a faceless social media company.

The result

So what am I going to do? I don't want to give up on the videos - they've become a way of life. But obviously I have to diversify, if I want the video blogging to continue to grow...

Anyway, as I am the kind of person who thinks scientifically the first thing to do is to verify the hypothesis, which means a) conducting an A+B test or two, and then b) interpreting the results before c) deciding what changes to make if any.

Incidentally, by reading this article you have already participated in part a of this test.

Thanks for the data!

I'll let you know what the results are in a week.