Avoid the algorithm! How I stay updated #antisocialmedia part 1
I am sure by now we have all wondered how the feed works on social media. Have you ever said, “I follow so many great people on Facebook and their posts never show up in my feed?”
Unlike Facebook, twitter etc, you don’t own that vehicle. You are at the mercy of their less than stellar algorithms. Yes, social media is great, but highly ineffective/inconsistent if you’re wanting Dilbert posts to appear daily in your feed at 7am every morning.
So what can we do?
I have broken down what helps me below. I am largely a consumer of content, but I do plan to throw my opinion on the web with my work every now and then. My solution is broken down into two categories, content consumer and content producer.
Consumer focused:
To consume content, I use an RSS reader called Feedly. “RSS” just means “Real Simple Syndicate”. For the sake of simplicity, RSS readers just aggregate your desired web sites into a neat concise feed. On the screenshot below, you can see a list of websites and their articles.
Real world scenario, I follow LOTS of business related web sites. Manually navigating to all the sites individually is impossible so I created a category on Feedly called, “Economics Finance Business” (shown above), I then added sites I follow to that category. Instead of logging into Facebook, I’m using Feedly to follow all my favorite web sites and authors. Keep in mind, this is not a social media site. This is just visible to you. The stream of my favorite web sites are not manipulated in any way (as of writing this post), the stream of content is first come first serve. At the beginning of the day, I can login to Feedly and catch up on everything in a highly efficient manor. In my case, I can consistently view my Dilbert posts every morning.
Content Producer focused:
How I distribute my content. Keep in mind, I am a new writer with many lessons still to learn, but below is a way that I have been able to distribute my content and obtain a decent view metrics on my site.
1. Email: Yes email is still very powerful. And unlike Facebook, you control when your content is delivered to your consumers. Using email you can always share your content when you want/how you want. On your site, create a vehicle so that users sign up to your mailing list. Also, I ask for emails in person. Seriously, whenever I meet someone in person that could be a potential reader of mine I ask for their permission and add them to my mailing list.
2. Blog: Using email, you can always direct people back to your blog. Why blog and not Facebook? Again, you don’t control Facebook. Blogs are 100% in your control so long as you own the site. Perhaps you want to do a banner promotion for extra revenue by using ads, or perhaps you want to control the feed of posts, you can do all this when you own the product. I personally use blogger for my blogs. I don’t completely own this platform. But blogger gives me more freedom than social media platforms. But there are a plethora of tools available for creating web sites such as WordPress.
3. Podcast: YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world. In terms of exposure, why wouldn’t you put something on there? Conversely, you can do an audio only podcasts and post them on iTunes etc. (Disclaimer: I am a millennial and we are now the largest generation.) On that note, every millennial I know listens to podcasts. At the very least, probability dictates that my content will get more exposure by simply participating in this media phenomenon. I have a YouTube channel that I pretty much ignore. But I am experimenting with posting my videos on that site. I have not put much effort into my YouTube channel due to lack of time, but I know it’s a pretty valuable site and plan to take video content more seriously in the future.
4. Buffer: This is a service that will post your new material straight to your social media sites so you don’t have to manually login to each site individually. So after I have a blog, I post it to buffer and then let the buffer application do it’s thing while I go sip a latte.
I am always experimenting with different apps and methods. However, largely these tools are what I use to navigate content on the world wide web. I hope you found value here. Please let me know what is working for you!
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