Increase your Social Gravity™

Overview – CogoBuzz integrated marketing solutions dramatically increase your social media success by understanding the algorithm, as it is described by hundreds of marketing experts, and using the platforms and solutions provided by CogoBuzz allow our customers to utilize the algorithm’s math to their benefit

At CogoBuzz we characterize the way Social Media platforms determine the exposure of a post, in all forms,  as being similar to gravity. The source of the post dictates the starting mass, as the post becomes more popular each engagement adds to the mass, as well as the rate of engagement, and the quality of the user profile initiating the engagement . The greater the mass the more exposure and the cycle continues and increases the “gravity” on each action. 

This paper provides a foundation and high-level view of why this is important and how the CogoBuzz platform can uniquely integrate Hotspot WiFi, Text Messaging, and Digital Displays to dramatically increase Social Gravity by manipulating the behavior of the famed social media algorithm. 

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To overly simplify the conundrum the algorithm poses for businesses, let’s discuss Facebook. Without question, Facebook would appear to be the largest de facto content management system, with millions of consumer interactions, such as pictures, posts, and reactions, every second of every day and 2.91 billion information consumers (omnicoreagency.com).  Facebook is faced with the dilemma of how to keep their consumers engaged, entertained and coming back for more. Mark Zukerberg’s character in the movie The Social Network emphasized that if we lose people’s interest for a second, they will find a more interesting platform. The algorithm determines which of the 55,000 posts made per second (bernardmarr.com) will show up in your timeline.

To continue the theme of “let’s over simplify”,  you can imagine the algorithm’s complexity. And if you’re Will Hunting from Good Will Hunting, maybe you care what the math looks like, but as a software engineer, I care more about understanding the input parameters that most affect the results. This is most easily accomplished  by reverse engineering the problem; not the algorithm, but the actual problem that Facebook is trying to resolve.

What problem is Facebook trying to resolve? They want to identify the most interesting content and show it to more consumers. If you are not showing me interesting content then I will find someone who does – Zuckerberg’s prime goal in the beginning of the movie.

Reverse engineering the problem  goes like this for an individual, and is similar for businesses:

• Popularity. Using the simplest metric, how many  followers do you have?
• Engagement. Historically your post gets a lot of feedback, i.e. likes, comments, and the Holy Grail, shares
• Growth. Your popularity continues to grow steadily – you are consistently gaining more followers, while losing significantly less, your consumer engagement factors trend higher
• Consistency. You regularly generate content that Facebook uses to stay relevant to their consumer, engagement remains steady, your base grows and the engagement remains high

That’s just the beginning, and already it’s clear there are so many additional moving parts to the problem, such as timing, opportunity, “value” of those engaging, and so much more, that a full understanding of the details would have to be presented by Facebook engineers and would result in a lot of eyes glazing over and mutterings of “whatever”. 

How can we, the common folk, characterize the problem and then use that simplified understanding to discuss how one might be able to influence the algorithm to gain increased exposure. The answer: use something we all understand from 4th grade – gravity. But, as it relates to Social Media, we use the term Social Gravity™; and for the purposes of simplifying the Facebook problem, it seems to work really well, although no analogy is perfect.

Let’s explore a first pass at how Social Gravity relates to our understanding of the problem, as described earlier: 

• Popularity. This is the equivalent to your mass: the difference between being the size of Mercury (tiny) to Jupiter (huge) the analogy is that the mass of the object is correlated to the number of followers; 
• Engagement. Using Earth, who’s gravity has attracted 7 billion people. When Earth makes a post about a hurricane, or a beautiful sunset, Earth’s followers add comments and reactions to the original post, in addition to creating new, user generated content with relevant hashtags and shares of the original post. The bigger the post, the more of the Earth’s followers are engaged. Not many Earth followers discuss my trip to Maine, but many are discussing the recent hurricane Ian, and even more the war in Ukraine; 
• Growth. In the case of gravity, your mass dictates your actual ability to attract; as more things are attracted to the object, its mass grows, as the mass grows more things are then attracted. The best example of this might be a Black Hole. The mass has grown so significantly that more and more bodies are attracted and the mass just keeps increasing.
• Consistency. Big impacts are big impacts but, as the example continues, the presence of Saturn, that maintains 83 moons in its orbit due to its gravity (i was shocked too) is of greater value than the comet Swift-Tuttle that gets massive attention as it passes  once every 133 years (yes, I looked that up too).