Follow the algo
"Followers are over… we launch accounts with 0 followers and have millions of views.” This from Gary Vaynerchuk earlier this year.
Joe highlighted this idea of we ‘no longer need followers’ in action too: "In early 2024, Miralax started regularly posting on TikTok, but a year in, it wasn’t entirely clear why. The brand had fewer than 200 followers, and its posts only averaged 363 views. Who the hell wanted to engage with a laxative brand?
But then in March, it made one simple change to its creative strategy, ditching the product plugs for constipation jokes tailored to 20-somethings. Its video views skyrocketed to 1.7 million with almost 30,000 likes.”
Elon Musk also has his finger on the pulse: “The biggest change that people should notice as we shift the recommendation algorithm to use more of @Grok AI is that banger posts from small accounts should start showing up in your feed.”
They will use Grok, to help find better content from smaller accounts. Something Threads is pretty good at.
And recently, Microsoft has been doing brand partnerships with influencers in less than 72 hours. The speed of memes, has only heightened. Miss them and they’re gone.
Why is this happening at once? It’s about the algo.
A shift to a AI algorithms, have the algos on the hunt for the latest/newest/best content - and to quickly propagate that out to their audience (you and me) in their personalized feeds. Their appetite for new content is insatiable. As Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says, this is by necessity because we don’t share enough content these days to fill the feed.
It’s no longer follow the leader, it’s follow the algo.
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Tactic
Rather than optimize to more followers. Think of the algo as your distribution and focus on content that resonates.
Dig deeper
We don’t share enough content says Instagram CEO.
Are we in the post follower era of social?
Microsoft turning around brand partnership faster and faster.
Are we in a no follower world?
X to use Grok to help highlight banger posts from smaller accounts.
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