The Main Thing The Algorithim Cares About
Your attention and the attention of others.
That’s what social media platforms care about.
They want to hold the audience’s attention and keep them on the platform for as long as possible.
If you create a piece of content that holds people’s attention then that content will be favoured by the alogorithim and pushed to more users.
For videos that’s really easy to measure - how much of your video do people watch?
TikTok, Instagram and even LinkedIn measure what percentage of your video people watch before scrolling past your video and onto the next.
For non-video content on platforms like LinkedIn, it’s dwell time. Do people pause on the feed to read/view your content?
It’s all about stopping the scroll.
You can stop scroll in a few ways, every now and again you may do it by accident but usually you have to be deliberate in how you do it.
Because people scroll a lot more than you’d imagine. The average person spends 108 minutes per day scrolling social media.
Assuming a scroll of 30 cm every 5 seconds, thats 388.8 metres per day—slightly more than the height of the Eiffel Tower.
So how do you stop the scroll?
There are a few methods that I’ve found works which I’ll write about in another post in more depth, but in summary:
A strong hook that grabs attention so people have to continue watching
Content that encourages comments so people stop to read them
Content that encourages users people to ‘Save/Bookmark’
Content that encourages users to like and share
Staying true to your niche
Ask yourself, when you scroll and notice a video or post has a lot of comments, saves, shares or likes do you find yourself spending more time consuming that content?
I know I do. It’s classic FOMO.
If so many people have liked this, shared this or commented on this then I need to know why. It must be good.
I’ll write another post on how to actually achieve the above in another post.
My LinkedIn Playbook
In "The LinkedIn Playbook: The No-Nonsense Guide To Building Your Personal Brand.", I’ll walk you through the exact steps I used to grow my LinkedIn following to over 50,000 and rack up more than 22 million post impressions in just 12 months. No gimmicks, just simple, proven strategies that actually work.