The Context In Which You Are Seen
During South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2007, Twitter, which had launched the year prior, saw its usage triple, from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets per day.
The company set up two screens in the hallways of the Austin Convention Centre, which displayed live tweets. Attendees used Twitter as a communication platform during the event, and continued to use it afterwards, proliferating and popularizing the service in the process.
At the time, Twitter was a fairly simple web application. Tweets were limited to 140 characters, a restriction designed to keep messages texted to the platform for posting from being split into parts. There wasn’t rich media support. The layout was extremely minimalist.
It was a pure expression of a microblogging platform, pithy and ephemeral.
If we fast forward almost 20 years, one of those aspects - the one that is arguably beneficial - is gone.
Log into your social media platform of choice, and you’ll be inundated with posts or interactions from people you’re connected with. No matter how far you scroll, there is always more content to see.
If you have a larger network, there’s a good chance that the next time you log in, you won’t see any of those posts. Sure, they continue to exist, and you can search for them, but they’re de-emphasized, buried under everything that’s been subsequently posted.
Due to both the mass of, and the emphasis on more recent, content, the value of any individual post to social media is almost zero.
While there is still merit to posting - remember that consistent effort over time is what leads to becoming a credible authority - the context in which you are seen will always be unknowable.
Maybe the platform puts your post between an ad and an autoplaying video, and someone scrolls right past it. Maybe someone sees a post they’re interested in, but they get a notification and they forget about it. Maybe your audience just isn’t using the platform at the time you post.
The end result is the same: regardless of the effort you put in or how valuable your insights are, you don’t really get anywhere. If you’re using social media as your primary marketing channel, it’s easy to get frustrated or feel as though you need to bargain with the platform to get results.
Because we’ve come to believe - maybe because these platforms have now been around for so long - that the things that we post last, and will last, long afterwards.
And yes, if we’re being literal, they do - but that material is not easy to surface, and there’s little chance someone would go digging for it, especially months or years later.
Think about the channels through which you discover people.
Is there an industry podcast you listen to that featured a guest with an interesting point of view?
Was there a new contributor to a newsletter you love?
Did you stumble across a blog post that solved a particularly difficult challenge?
All of these channels are tangible - they provide a concrete thing with persistent value.
People can download a podcast or receive a newsletter or visit a website long after a social media post generates impressions.
When you don’t rely on a single platform, you’re creating the opportunity to be seen in different contexts.
By demonstrating your knowledge and expertise in different ways, through different mediums, you’ll reach people you never would have before.