Soft messages and the downward spiral of Social Media

It’s a funny, sad old time.

It’s been a year since my dad passed away so I wrote a blog post (as I do) to capture what I’ve been feeling and published it.

I have my blog set up so that when I publish, it automatically pushes the post out to my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

If my posts are business oriented posts they are suited to LinkedInand Twitter and if they are more personal they are suited to Facebook and Twitter.

The auto publish facility that I have set up with my blog doesn’t differentiate and this personal post was pushed out to all.

You would reasonably expect that this personal post would “perform” best on Facebook (which is really the best platform for family and friends) but the platform where I got the biggest feedback and reaction was on LinkedIn, which makes no sense really!!

I was getting some really heartfelt responses from people who clearly had read the post and were leaving some nice messages and even sharing some of their own experiences.

Why wouldn’t this personal post resonate more on Facebook and Twitter?

There is nothing wrong with my logic – this type of post is most relevant to my Facebook audience, those friends and family who use it primarily to chill out, catch up on news and gossip when the work of the day is done.

The truth is Facebook (and Twitter is also following suit) have gone way too far, the algorithms are manipulating the posts from your friends so much that you end up seeing very few of these in between too many sponsored posts.

At this stage very few of us are seeing the posts by friends and family and those from organisation and business pages that we follow.

So, my conclusion isn’t that the business audience are suddenly more interested in “personal stuff”, it’s that LinkedIn is still just about hanging in there as a place that isn’t totally warped by those algorithms, those set of rules that dictate what we see and don’t see. I wonder about those working in these social media companies and if they believe that what they are actually is a good thing – they are not!!

They are eroding the value that we have in their platforms, bit by bit , which will impact on their market value eventually.

As for LinkedIn, hopefully this platform will try to stay pure.

For anyone in business using these platforms, if you want your posts to be seen you need to advertise – we are in that phase where people think it’s still worthwhile.

It won’t last too long …

Greg

Greg Canty is a Partner of Fuzion Communications who offer Social Media Consultancy Services from our offices in Dublin and Cork, Ireland