social media – Davina Jane

Anyone else slightly over the endless perfect pastel pink and blue hued travel shots closely chased by the “follow me” photo phenomenon and inspiring quotes making us feel so motivated for all of 5 seconds. That is until our limited attention span is distracted by a cute cat sitting in a sink or funny kid dancing? Wanderlust has taken over Instagram, Facebook and any other image based social platforms. Lets travel the earth, sing Kumbaya and tell everyone about our amazing spiritual existence. Are our everyday lives so bad that we exist to live vicariously through the eyes of the multitudes of travel and lifestyle bloggers who take a thousand shots, retouch for hours and present us with this unrealistic image of life? Just maybe…

Wanderlust has risen with the wave of social media fixation. Its interesting to see this unrealistic way of life is slowly slowly being pushed aside as our interest peaks in the “behind the scenes” reality of these images. The side by side before and afters, the flexed and unflexed, the “situation outside” the Insta crop. People are over competing with these crazy cool lifestyles in the face of something more real and close to their reality…

I like beautiful things and love to travel so my interest will still be peaked by Wanderlust and the masses of content out there. I do however so much enjoy being let into the secret of what’s “just outside the crop”! Continue to share the realities people, we love it!

Lets hope so!

Don’t panic if you’re a brand on the other end of this algorithm change… its not all doom and gloom but quite possibly a change that’s been a long time coming and will only positively impact users of the social networking site. So what are these changes you may be wondering? How will they impact my personal page? How will they impact my business page? Well lets keep it simple…Facebook’s algorithm has changed, as it constantly does however this news worthy change means the organic (unpaid) reach of a brands post will be far less than prior to the change. Posts from business pages will not appear as frequently in a persons newsfeed. Brands will have to pay through ads, sponsored or boosted posts for reach on the site.

This change has opinions divided. Consumers will have a better experience seeing mostly friend and family posts in their newsfeeds. Brands will have to work harder to produce more high quality content that is meaningful and engaging to the user. The upside is the user will be less likely to see junk content…the practice whereby business post sub par content just for the sake of posting content. This practice is being more and more widely seen as businesses set goals to post “x” amount of times per day or week without taking into account the value of the material they are posting or the relevance and interest to the audience.

Of course Facebook will generate a significant amount of revenue through this manoeuvre and businesses will be forced to spend more money on creating content and paying for people to see it. Lets hope for a more relevant and engaging feed because at the end of the day we all need to spend more time on social media…right?