Mitch Joel published a really interesting post on his Six Pixels blog, (Almost) No One Is Seeing Your Content.

As a marketer using social media as a platform for dissemination, nearly nothing scares me as much as the idea that my message is lost and never reaches my intended audience.  The unfortunately reality is my fear is most likely a reality.

“We used to tell ourselves a very powerful narrative about how the cream always rises to the top, and the struggle that most brands face when it comes to content marketing and social media is that they struggle to find a true sense of human-ness in the content that they are creating… so many brands actually have great content, but have a sub-par content distribution strategy where the vast majority of the work resides behind their own walled garden.”

Mitch makes the rather disappointing observation that despite the money and time brands pour into social media marketing, their messages are filtered by third parties (the platforms themselves) and are often never seen by their fans and followers.

As a marker that really bursts my bubble.  As an individual it is even more upsetting.  I hated when Facebook decided that it was only going to show certain people in your newsfeed based on who you interacted with most frequently.  The whole reason I am friends with people on Facebook is so I can follow along with their lives as much or as little as I want to.  I now am completely cut off from several of my connections and might not even remember that we’re Facebook friends.  I was so much happier when I could control my newsfeed by “show more” and “show less” and specifying what kinds of news I wanted to see, e.g. (relationship status updates, photos, etc.)  The sad part for me, is that the social media platforms are so worried about becoming irrelevant they keep tweaking their algorithms and I worry they are going to end up like Joan Rivers’ face… too altered too remotely resemble what they started with, which was what drew the users in the first place.