Are We in the Post-Follower Era of Social?
Three big trends are driving a massive shift in social media strategies and funnels.
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In early 2024, Miralax started regularly posting on TikTok, but a year in, it wasn’t entirely clear why. The brand had fewer than 200 followers, and its posts only averaged 363 views. Who the hell wanted to engage with a laxative brand?
But then in March, it made one simple change to its creative strategy, ditching the product plugs for constipation jokes tailored to 20-somethings. Its video views skyrocketed to 1.7 million with almost 30,000 likes.
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Speaking last week at POSSIBLE — the annual conference where marketers get trashed in Miami Beach for “work” — Gary Vaynerchuk explained this phenomenon simply: “Followers are over.”
This may sound like typical GaryVee hyperbole, but if you spend time creating content for social, it rings true. You can have zero followers on TikTok and get millions of views if the content is good. You can have 300,000 followers on LinkedIn and get 800 impressions because your content is giving cubicle.
Look all around, and there’s growing evidence that we’re officially in a post-Follower Era of Social — driven by three big trends.
1. Every social media platform is copying TikTok’s crackorithm
For much of the 2010s, it seemed like no new social media platform could break through. But then in 2019, TikTok caught fire in the US thanks to a simple innovation: An algorithm that didn’t care who you were friends with or following. It just cared about what you liked.
TikTok’s addictive algorithm and “For You” page made it the fastest-growing social media app of all time, and over the past few years, every major social media platform has been copying it. They’re showing you less content from people you’re connected with and follow in favor of content the algorithm thinks you’ll like — primarily TikTok-style vertical video. Shit, even LinkedIn added a Reels tab, frantically pushing Steve Jobs porn to the professional masses.
The wild thing about TikTok-style algorithms is that followers don’t seem to matter. For years, I avoided TikTok because I have as much self-control as a 20-year-old frat bro let loose in Ibiza for the first time. I just don’t trust myself around its crackorithm. But recently, I decided to try an experiment: posting on TikTok while still banning myself from watching content in the feed. Despite having only 20 followers, the first video I posted last week got 7500 views and 340 likes; the next one got over 60,000 views, 3K likes, and counting.
Followers used to be a prerequisite for reach; now, it’s unclear how much they matter at all.
2. The great marketer and creator revolt
In early January, as days counted down to the TikTok ban in the US, Substack launched a marketing blitz to recruit TikTok creators to its platform. It even offered a $25,000 “TikTok Liberation Prize” to anyone who created a viral trend that would bring people over.
Although the TikTok ban didn’t come into effect (and probably never will), it was a gift to Substack, highlighting the fucked up truth about traditional social media platforms: You’re building a house on rented land and have no ownership over your audience.
Substack’s great innovation isn’t that it’s a writing platform or a newsletter platform; it’s that it’s incentives are aligned with yours, and it lets you export your subscribers. You own your audience. Marketers and creators are quickly waking up to the fact that you’re insane if you only focus on followers. The platforms can take away your followers at any second, or the algorithms can just stop showing them your content. I would trade in my 35,000 followers on LinkedIn for 1,000 more subscribers on Substack in a second.
Marketers, creators, and influencers used to ask people to follow. Now, they’re driving them to their Substack or Patreon to subscribe. The funnel has changed.
3. The rise of the Group Chat
Last week in Semafor, Ben Smith wrote a stunning story about the private group chats among America’s elite that had pushed the oligarch rightward since the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversations that used to happen on Twitter are happening within the intimate echo chambers of WhatsApp and Signal — and Silicon Valley mogul/Coneheads star Marc Andreessen is somehow at the center of “hundreds” of them.
But this group chat trend isn’t limited to Andreessen and Oligarchs. More and more people are turning group chats into powerful micro-social networks for the same reasons — it’s hard to find your friends on open social platforms, and there’s always a risk of saying the wrong thing and being put on blast. On the Hard Fork podcast last week, Platformr founder Casey Newton revealed that all of the journalists who used to banter on Twitter now almost exclusively trade notes in group chats.
As a result, we can think about this new, post-follower era of social in three camps:
If you want to build an audience, use algorithm-driven social networks to expand your reach, but do everything you can to drive people to subscription-based platforms.
And if you want to influence the oligarchs, then you'd better get in one of the group chats. Where’s my invite, Marc? It feels like you’re talking to everyone in America but me!
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Content advice of the week
This comes from the one and only Ann Handley:
Avoid passive voice in your writing by using the "by zombies" test.
Here's how it works: If you can add "by zombies" after the verb in a sentence and still make grammatical sense, it's passive voice. Rebecca Johnson, deputy director of the Marine Corps War College, devised it a few years ago.*
PASSIVE VOICE (can add "by zombies"):
The white paper was written... (by zombies) ✓
The village was destroyed... (by zombies) ✓
The brains were slurped (by zombies) with merriment and verve ✓
ACTIVE VOICE (cannot add "by zombies"):
I wrote the white paper... (by zombies) ✗
They destroyed the village... (by zombies) ✗
May you slurp each brain with merriment and verve... (by zombies) ✗
Passive voice isn't wrong. But it does feel DEAD: Sentences shuffle around like they're overmedicated.
Active voice is delightfully alive: A flicker of life instead of hollow zombie eyes.
Job of the week: Investment Writer, Citi
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Tool of the week: ChatGPT o3
I know — really out of the box suggestion here, Joe! But OpenAI’s latest o3 reasoning model — available in any of the paid versions of ChatGPT — is pretty insane for strategy tasks. While ChatGPT is still pretty mid at writing, the o3 model is VERY good at marketing strategy, product marketing, and competitive research tasks because it’s natively integrated with Search. If this is part of your job, you’ll save 10+ hours. It’s a pretty damn good use of $20/month.
P.S. Don’t forget to sign up to come hang out with me at the Pros & Content Summit next month! Request your spot here.
I think you should drop everything and trademark the word “crackorithm”
Really interesting post - and love the Conehead picture!