The Problem with your Social Media Feed

There are 4 types of relationships in a social network:
Family & Friends, Celebrities, Interesting Strangers, and Acquaintances.

1. Family & Friends are the people you truly care about. You are interested in what they are doing, where they are, and how they are feeling, at all times. The most important content on your social feed is the content created by these people.
2. Celebrities are the people who you consider yourself a ‘fan’ or a ‘follower’ of. These people inspire or enertain you in whatever they do, and so they contribute a lot of value to your social media feed. Much like family & friends, you want to know what your favorite celebrities are up to at all times.
3. Interesting Strangers are people that aren’t neccessarily famous, but are interesting to you. Maybe you can relate to them, are inspired by them, or entertained by them. Whether you discovered this person on a social media platform or not, they also contribute an important value to your feed.
4. Acquaintances are the people that you “know of them” but don’t actually know them. Truthfully, these people don’t matter much to you. If you haven’t made an effort to become friends with them, you obviously aren’t that interested in what they are up to.

With that said, it appears that the order of the list above shows the order of importance of these kinds of relationships to you on social media.

Family & Friends, Celebrities, Interesting Strangers, and Acquaintances.

It is logical that this same list, should also correlate to the amount of content contributed to your feed by these types of people. In other words, the majority of your feed should be contributed by your family & friends. And the least should be contributed by mere acquaintances.

Now think about your feeds on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And the list of stories on Snapchat. You will notice that the this space is dominated by your acquaintances: The people you truly don’t care about, yet you are “friends” with them on social media.

This graph varies for each individual user, however this approximately represents the average user.

Most of the content on your feed, is created by people you care about the least. And not only is what you see mostly posted by acquaintances, what you post is mostly seen by acquaintances.

My take on likes: Who cares if someone who is merely an acquaintance to you taps “Like” on your picture? Doesn’t it mean more if it’s someone that matters to you? In a way, it’s a question about quality of likes or quantity of likes.

The algorithms that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter use to properly order your feed, have not solved this problem. If someone belongs at the bottom of your feed, maybe they don’t belong on your feed in the first place.

By removing acquaintances from your social network, you open up more space on your feed. This allows the people that matter most to you to document even more about their every-day life.

Thanks for reading! Please get in touch with me if you are interested in continuing the conversation, or if you have input you would like me to hear. Happy 4th of July!