}

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Unpredictable responses

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on

The thing about sharing things to social media is that it’s actually really hard to correctly guess which of those things will be “popular” or spark a reaction of some sort. The photo above is an example of that.

I took the photo Friday night, just before our weekly dinner with family. It’s always casual, and while we cooked this week, it’s often takeaways. I sincerely meant what I said in the Instagram caption, and I shared it there and on my personal Facebook because it was a light and positive thing, when so much of what I see in my social media is darker—and often negative. As far as I was concerned, that was that.

However, some of my Facebook friends left positive comments or clicked “Like” or other “reactions”, which so far total around 30. All of which makes this particular post moderately popular, compared to other things I’ve shared, but that also means it was far more popular than I expected.

I’ve seen that sort of thing happen before, though usually the reverse: Things I think will be popular aren’t. It also often surprises me which of my Instagram shares on this blog get a lot of page views, and which ones don’t.

There are consultants who make a LOT of money from advising clients on how to maximise their social media impact. I imagine that at least some of them have a rough idea of what they’re doing, so some must actually help their clients. But for most of us, especially those of us who blog or share things on social media for fun, not profit, there’s seldom a way to correctly guess what things will be popular.

I think that’s a good thing. If we were able to guess what was popular, we might focus only, or even just mostly, on those sorts of things, and where’s the fun in that? Personally, I’d much rather blog about whatever topic I want, and share whatever I want on social media, and then be surprised by the reaction. Or lack of. Either way, to me it’s much more fun—and interesting.

Hm, I wonder what would happen if I posted more photos of salads…

No comments: