Let's Talk About Reach, Baby!

I'm Tara McMullin, and this is What Works, the show that rethinks work, business, and today, again, social media for the 21st century economy. Today, I want to talk about reach. About a month ago, I shared that I was rethinking social media. Now, in an ideal world, I wouldn't create media for platforms that have been found to ignore the defects of their product to the detriment of users' health.

But we don't live in an ideal world, and I want a way to reach more people with the media I make. Anyhow, I started my foray back into the jaws of the algorithm on Instagram, where I have a modest follower base. I've posted eight reels, short, vertical videos where I talk direct to camera. So far, I've used about three formats.

One, an idea from a book. Two, an idea from my long-form content. And three, life and work advice, Tara's version. What I expected was that I'd post my first video after a long dormancy and get some solid reach, something like 10 to 15% of my total follower count in views.

Platforms love to reward you when you come back after time away. There's like a little mini inchidification cycle that happens. Then after that first little surge of views, I expected to see a significant drop off, perhaps only one or 2% of my total follower count. And then maybe I'd get into a rhythm, see what was working, and hopefully reach some sort of equilibrium, maybe 4% to 5% of total follower count.

Well, dear listener, this is not what happened. My first video did about as well as I expected, about 14% of total follower count in views. The second video did see a big drop, down to about 6% of total follower count in views. The third video did slightly better.

Then my fourth video broke containment. It got 113% of total follower count in views. And for what it's worth, it was the first video that I made with Edits, Instagram's own video editing app, which does seem to help with reach. And to be clear, I actually edited the thing in Final Cut Pro first and then added some bells and whistles in edits because this girl doesn't have the patience or eyesight to edit video on her phone.

How do you know she's a millennial? Okay, so after that video that broke containment, the next video saw a big drop in views, just about 5% of total follower count. The last three have reached something more like 10%. So this was all very surprising.

My hypothesis was completely shot. What I thought was going to happen is not what happened. And this is why you need a hypothesis when you're doing an experiment so you can make sense of the data and come back with a new theory. I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

But before we get to that, what was even more surprising than the view counts themselves were how those view counts broke down between followers and non-followers. Allow me to don my elder millennial internet grandma hat. Back in my day, reach came first from followers and then from non-followers. That is the algorithm would serve content to those who indicated they wanted to see it first And then if those people engaged with it the algorithm might serve it to people who are similar to those followers.

Suffice it to say, Instagram's algorithms have changed while I was away. More than 30% of my first video's views came from non-followers. More than 95% of views on the video that broke containment came from non-followers. And more than 85% of views on my last video posted June 22nd came from non-followers.

Now, on the one hand, this is exactly what I was hoping for, right? I wanted to make content for social media again to reach new people and address my distribution problem. On the other hand, what? I came back to social media with a new perspective on how to create content, parasocial media, and I knew that algorithmic distribution had become more interest-based rather than follower-based.

But I am gobsmacked by the sheer magnitude of the change I've experienced so far. It's not just creating parasocial media. It's creating parasocial media for a parasocial algorithm? Or maybe an antisocial algorithm?

I don't know. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this stuff. Now, in an interview on Decoder this week, Patreon CEO Jack Conte decried the loss of what he called deterministic reach on most social media platforms. What he means is that social media users have built audiences over time that now they can't reliably reach with the media they make.

When you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator's deterministic line of reach to their fans. And if a creator can't reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build true community around their work, but they also can't build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business is this shift of the Internet, you know, away from follower based paradigms and and into interest based paradigms.

And, you know, I'll add here that it seems the advertising industry has a slightly different definition for this term. And while Conti doesn't exactly define his own usage, I'm pretty confident about how I've interpreted it. Okay, a deterministic line of reach, deterministic reach. Determinism here refers to the way one set of inputs can be run through a computer program multiple times, and every time the output will be the same.

That's deterministic programming or deterministic algorithms. The same way two plus two always equals four, unless, of course, you're doing weird mathematics things that I do not want to think about. Now, something like email marketing has a fairly deterministic reach. I have a list of email subscribers.

I email them. I'm relatively sure that my email will end up in about 99% of their inboxes. Podcasting is the same way. If I publish a podcast episode, I know it's going to show up in followers' apps.

Social media has never really had that kind of reliability. Maybe super duper early on, but it hasn't been that way for 15 years now. But there was a time that you could be sure you were reaching anywhere from 10 to 30% of your followers each time you posted. The question mark was always whether non-followers would see what you posted.

That's what made growth difficult. Today's media platform algorithms have completely flipped this calculation. Now less than 3 of my followers see my content even as my view counts tick up Now, in the metrics I just shared, I'm using a percentage of total follower count as a ratio, that is follower count to views. Even the idea of this ratio sort of belies my default thinking on this kind of metric.

I'm so used to thinking about views coming from followers first and non-follower second, when really in this new social media metric landscape, this idea of follower count to views is pretty useless, other than slapping me upside the head to show me how much things have changed. So I point out that it's a ratio to make it clear that it is not the percentage of my followers that I actually reached. So let's look at some really specific numbers. My last video seems to have reached less than 320 of my 13,000 followers, or about two and a half percent.

The video before that did about the same, reaching about 360 followers, but with fewer overall views. In other words, there is no way for me to reliably reach my followers on Instagram. There is no deterministic reach. In marketing speak, social media has always been more of a top of funnel kind of activity.

But now the middle of the funnel, let alone the bottom of the funnel, is just not there anymore. Now, again, speaking as your elder millennial Internet grandma, I know this. I've known this. And these results, well, they were still shocking to me because who I am reaching is non-followers and at a much higher rate than I could have imagined.

It just doesn't compute. Now, all of these numbers are just my results, and they only represent about four weeks of what will likely be a 12-week experiment. So please, please don't take any of this analysis as definitive or as implicit advice. Because it absolutely is not.

Thanks for the advice. So from a purely metric-based marketing objective angle, my experiment is a success already. I wanted to reach new people, and I'm reaching way more new people than I expected. But as ever, these results are just the tip of the iceberg metric.

There's way more information below the surface. Now, I haven't looked too far into what's going on with my follower account with regard to video views, although it has gone up, and whether those video views are turning into more meaningful metrics like website visits or email subscribers. There's not enough data yet to derive much meaning, and I might not even have enough data or a clear enough trend to figure that out by the end of the summer. And that's okay.

It's not really the hypothesis I was testing anyway. Where I am right now is left wondering how reaching predominantly non-followers changes the media I create. One of the very lovely things about more deterministic reach is that you know you are largely communicating with a group of people who are more or less familiar with your work. For example, I don't worry about pissing off MAGA Republicans with my newsletter, not, as I might like, because I am a courageous truth teller, but because I make my whole project off-putting to MAGA Republicans.

It's not for them, and so they don't subscribe. Quoting Marx or taking for granted the exploitation of the capitalist labor regime isn going out on a limb It actually quite comfortable and safe Now I can craft the media I make to ensure that the algorithm will mostly distribute it to little lefty nerds like me But I think my work can have a much broader appeal, so I don't really want to do that. Or rather, another hypothesis might be that there are lots of people out there who are a few well-reasoned vertical videos away from becoming little lefty nerds like me.

But there's also the opposite impulse. I can make media that appeals to lots of people to boost my reach and ensure more of the right people get to see it, hopefully opting to become followers or subscribers or, hell, customers. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad strategy, but there are plenty of ways it can go very wrong. I might dilute my core message, attract viewers who inadvertently push my content in a direction I don't want to go, or simply focus more on reaching lots of people than saying what I want to say.

In the era of deterministic reach, audience capture could be a big problem for creators. Audience capture is a phenomenon in which a creator becomes overly responsive to their followers. It's a reinforcing feedback loop that encourages ever more siloed, extreme, or radical content. In paradigmatic examples, creators end up hurting themselves or others to produce the content their audience wants to see.

But in less flashy cases, audience capture can lead people to just make poor decisions. If you've ever watched a marketer pivot from selling one zeitgeisty strategy to another, you've seen a version of audience capture. What I'm trying to say is that I don't think the incentives and impulses that are familiar as audience capture disappear just because you're not reliably reaching a consistent audience. Instead, it makes audience capture more diffuse, less recognizable, all at the same time that it is flattening the expression of a wide variety of creators into the same memes, templates, and language.

For that, we got to go back to the algorithm. Avoiding that flattening is tricky, though. I've modeled a few of my videos on the hashtag bookstagram or hashtag booktalk style. And I feel pretty good about that.

But then I've also found myself tapping the books in front of the camera, you know, that thing that creators do. I don't want to do that. Why am I doing that? Luckily, I do not and will not have the appropriate fingernails for actually pulling that off.

But I digress. I wanted to share all this, this messy first-pass analysis and my honest questions about how media gets made for the interest-based algo, because I know peering behind the curtain can be helpful. Mostly, I wanted you to know that if you feel confused by how patterns have changed and frustrated that everything you thought you knew about social media or social media marketing has become increasingly obsolete, I am right there with you. Welcome to Internet Grandmahood.

This is not what I expected from experimenting with social media again, but I'm always happy to have big, hairy, unexpected questions to consider.