Cultural Content – Facebook, X, Insta - who's on them & where they've come from
The social graph platforms: Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram
Hi Team Content,
This week I’ve got the first post in a new series about social media platforms.
In this post I’m covering the main / original social platforms most of the cultural sector are on; Facebook, X (better known as ‘Twitter’, and Instagram.
This post will help you:
Get a sense of how the platforms differ from one another in terms of audience base and functionality.
Get a feel for how the algorithms are structured around the business priorities of these organisations, and what that means for content you post.
Evaluate what channels you’re on and why, and which is the best fit with your audience development objectives.
In subsequent posts I’ll look at:
An overview of discovery engine-based platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
Threads and Meta’s quest to take on YouTube, TikTok and X/Twitter.
More specialist platforms like LinkedIn.
Collections discovery opportunities via Pinterest (and also Wikipedia!)
A more granular explanation (and with more examples) of what works on the individual platforms.
Provide some overarching takeaways in terms of creating organic and engaging social media content.
I’ve also got the brilliant Caspian Turner, Director of Accessible by Design, lined up to write about accessible social media in January.
Where did this platform come from?
In 2004 “TheFacebook” was launched, initially to Harvard students but rapidly expanding to other universities - and, by 2006 – non academic email addresses.
It’s actually relatively difficult to find old pictures of the Facebook feed, but here are a few as I remember it (👵):
If we look at the picture on the left, there are a few key differences with the Facebook we know today:
Facebook originally had quite random ads, lots of ‘meet hot singles’ and university specific ads (as in the pic above – for vaccine studies).
Facebook launched as a website, not as a mobile app, there was no infinite scroll - you could quite feasibly get to the end of your Facebook notifications and go about your day when there was nothing else to see.
In 2009 Facebook launched the ‘like’ button. This was pretty similar to existing sites like Reddit’s upvote but not as ubiquitous as it is today (Twitter didn’t create a ‘like’ button until 2015).
When you originally created your Facebook profile page you could enter info about your interests – your favourite films, TV, books etc, and sometimes follow groups with other people who liked similar things.
What was super sneaky on Facebook’s part (and not very well documented online) is that around 2007 Facebook took the words you’d entered as ‘things you like’ in your bio and subscribed you to follow business pages of companies and brands that it had gradually been amassing that corresponded with what you’d manually entered as things you liked on your profile.
Also in 2007 Facebook began creating its own ads platform. This is where the vast majority of its revenue comes from today and is the key differentiator in profitability between Facebook and X/Twitter.
Since 2007 Facebook’s ads platform has become increasingly sophisticated and allows companies and organisations to target people on Facebook (or Instagram) with a forensic level of detail. Above are a few screenshots from the ads platform showing the ability to create ads targeted at different groups of people by age, interest, geography, and so on.
What’s it doing now?
There have been lots and lots of news stories over the years about Facebook, and countless controversies (possibly most famously the Cambridge-Analytica data scandal where millions of Facebook users’ data was used – without their consent – to create targeted psychographic political adverts on Facebook to support the 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump).
Despite this, Facebook still has globally 3 billion monthly active users. There are only 7.9 billion people in the world, and not all of them have daily access to the internet. Across the world Facebook has the largest amount of active monthly users.
In the UK there are 45 million Facebook users, and only 67 million people in the country. Facebook is still the only platform where the majority of the UK population have accounts on it. The most popular age demographic is 25-34.
When polled, people tend to say they are on Facebook primarily to keep in touch with friends and family, but also to find out about local events and groups. This makes sense; of all the platforms, Facebook is the one you’re most likely to be friends with you mum on. Facebook does also have tools like events and groups that allow local and special interest networks to organise more easily than on other social platforms.
Quizzes are some of Facebook’s most widely shared content (although this isn’t unique to Facebook) – this is incidentally how Cambridge Analytica were able to get all that data, through an innocuous looking ‘personality quiz’. Quizzes benefit from being easy to complete within the post, rather than requiring clicking through to an external website.
In Facebook’s ‘Most Widely Viewed Content Reports’, the posts that have done well over the last 2-3 years are the ones which are very easy for anyone to engage with and share. A lot of these are quizzes or feature a call to action that requires only a single comment to ‘complete’.
For example:
Neither of these posts are very cleverly constructed, or directly related to the person posting them. But their popularity demonstrates part of what does well on Facebook: content that’s easy to engage with (there is a suggested format to your response) and that tells you something about yourself or is a puzzle/challenge to complete.
Here’s a Facebook post I wrote in a cultural sector context that works along similar lines (this was posted the day after Boris’s ‘very simple instruction: stay inside’ at the start of the UK lockdown)
The key with all social media creative is to arrest attention, to make someone stop scrolling. Most people will scroll over the visual components of your post first, and — if it’s interesting — read the text for more context. Therefore the visuals are the most important part of your post, and the text should build on the interest raised by the visuals.
I’ll go into more detail about what works well and less well on Facebook (with more examples) in a subsequent post.
Twitter / X
Where did this platform come from?
Twitter launched in 2006 (around the time Facebook was expanding out of only providing its service to those at university).
The main content that populated the original Twitter feeds were updates from accounts you followed. This was more likely to be authority figures than, for instance, your mum (who’s on Facebook). Twitter (certainly historically) has worked well for breaking news, memes, and allowing the general public to have a visible dialogue with those in positions of power.
Twitter content was originally predominantly text based, although today image and video formats are likely to perform better. Initially posts had to be 140 characters long, but in 2017 Twitter allowed you to ‘thread’ multiple tweets together (and in 2018 it increased the character count of a single tweet to 280).
One of the more distinctive things about Twitter used to be the ability it gave the user to override the algorithm and show a chronological feed of posts:
X has since dialled back on this and replaced it with a ‘For You’ page (using the same terminology as TikTok):
What’s it doing now?
At the time of writing ‘X’ currently has 564 million monthly active users (so about a sixth of Facebook’s).
It’s currently ranked 14th by numbers of monthly active users, after Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
In the UK 23.3 million have a Twitter account. Engagement has taken a huge hit since Elon Musk took over a year ago; the platform has lost around 12% of its user base since then.
Despite that, there are some great examples of organisations continuing to get fantastic engagement on the platform. Exhibit 1: Orkney Library:
Where did this platform come from?
Instagram launched in 2010 – and looked like this:
No Reels. No Stories. Instagram’s main unique functionality in 2010 was the ability to quickly add arty-filters to square photos. 2010 was the beginning of a big growth period in sales of smartphones, it was much easier than it had been previously to take, share and store high quality pictures, and Instagram was the first major app that offered an easy way to photo edit and make your pictures look cool.
In 2012 Instagram was bought by Meta (the company that also owns Facebook). Instagram has since rolled into Meta’s highly lucrative ads market. Today Instagram accounts for 42% of Meta’s overall ad revenue.
Today Instagram has around 2 billion monthly active users, it’s the 4th most popular social media app after Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.
Instagram’s algorithm has gone through a lot of changes in the last couple of years. Supposedly the algorithm favours the newer features, such as Reels and Stories over feed posts. However, Instagram is also using features like Reels to try and create a TikTok style discovery experience, so it seems likely that your success with these new formats will depend on how well your Reels content performs to an audience who is not your follower base - and if it does well with that test audience - it will then be more widely distributed (but again, not necessarily to your followers or anyone with any prior context on who you are, where you’re based and what services you provide).
Next week I’ll look at YouTube, TikTok and Threads. The key differences between i) Facebook/Twitter/Instagram and ii) YouTube and TikTok is that the algorithm for the first is built off of a social graph and for the second from a discovery engine (c.f. useful New Yorker article outlining the difference).
We’ll also look at Threads, and how this plays in to the battle for dominance / attention amongst the social media big players.
While the original feeds and algorithms for Fb/Tw/Insta were based on who you follow, TikTok and YouTube instead focus on serving you algorithmic recommendations based on what you’ve viewed and responded to before – so who you ‘follow’ is irrelevant really, since most people will be served content based on their interests. This makes for a more dynamic feed and seems to correlate with increased time in the platform. We’ll talk more about what this means for content creators in the next post.
I hope you enjoyed all of this, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
One last thing, over the last few months we’ve been asking cultural organisations if they’d like to participate in an online collections benchmarking study. We’re specifically interested in what variables affect how discoverable GLAM’s online collections are. We’ve now closed the study for recruitment and are starting to analyse the data, and it’s fascinating!
Join us for an online webinar on 15th November, where we discuss the findings