Play the Game Be Social on Social Media

Did you know that your social media platform learns from the actions you take? Everything that you do is analyzed, and social media uses that to determine what kind of information presented to you. This is true for virtually all social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram among others. Even search engines such as Google and Bing keep track of  your behavior and change what information you receive based on your habits.

How does this work?

Let’s keep it simple for the purposes of illustration. Let’s say you have a habit of reading posts about solar power. Over time, you’ll start to see more articles, pictures and videos about solar power appearing in the feeds of your social media. If you also link, share and comment on related posts, then you’ll see even more about that subject.

Thus, if you favor certain articles about your political beliefs, the social media platforms and search engines will present you with more information related to them.

On the positive side, this means you are spared seeing information about subjects that are not interesting to you. Your feed will contain posts from friends, news sources, and web sites directly related to your political beliefs.

There’s a darker side to this technology, however. You will NOT be presented with information outside of your interest, which is determined by what you read, like, share and comment on. That might seem to be a good thing, since it acts as an automatic, learning filter, but it creates echo chambers on the internet.

What is an echo chamber?

That’s where everything you say and think is mirrored back to you. It creates a confirmation bias, confirming everything you think as true. Since more and more posts, articles, videos and links are related to your beliefs it begins to confirm your beliefs as true. This can get to the point where you never see any other opinions. Thus, you get the phenomenon of someone with left-wing beliefs being shocked when they encounter a right-wing person and have a conversation – they get the feeling they have walked into another universe with different rules.

Be that as it may, you can use this behavior to your advantage. Do this by commenting, liking and sharing posts that match your audience in some way. Also, create targeted posts of your own. You’ll slowly start to see more and more information in that area.

Not only that, but by posting, commenting, sharing and liking, you’re playing the social media game (and the search engines have the same game). When you do this, you’ll receive traffic related to your activities. On YouTube, for example, comment, like and share videos related to the subject matter of your own videos on your channel. YouTube will, after a few months, send you related traffic. That’s because you’re playing their game.

This is one reason why it’s important to continually be active on social media as part of your marketing campaign. If you don’t do anything, social media and the search engines will forget about you.

Richard Lowe Jr

Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.