Life in the fast lane

Last week I posted a meme that Zuck and his army of dopamine dealers decided to put in the "fast lane." I'm stealing that analogy from my favorite writer-about-social-media, Rachel Karten. If you're curious about learning more about how social media works, I encourage you to subscribe to her newsletter, Link In Bio, which is a go-to resource in the social media industry. It has made me a lot better at my job. Shoutout Rachel.

The theory I'm stealing is that in the age of modern social media algorithms, posts either go in a "fast lane" or a "slow lane." Hit or flop. This is because algorithms have shifted from social graphs (seeing posts from friends and accounts you follow) to interest graphs (seeing posts from anyone or anything the platform thinks you might like). Every post enters a talent show against all other posts. Fun, right? Happy Hunger Games.

The average Train Songz post over the last two years has gotten 16,300 impressions and 1,930 likes. This post reached...a lot more people than that.

Of the 180,000 who saw it, only 10% were existing train_songz followers. Of those 160,000 or whatever new people who saw it, we got a whopping 369 new followers, and I'm sure about half of them will probably drop off once they realize how deeply niche this page is. They're coming in from all corners of the internet, not our little corner. Which brings me to...

#SocialMediaStrategy

If you're still reading, I'm going to bore you with some deeeeeeeep-in-the-weeds social media strategy.

If you look at train_songz's post history, you'll notice we don't post a lot of videos (reels). I mostly avoid them because they typically reach non-followers at a higher rate than single-image posts. Reels are great if you're committed to them and want to grow your account by getting in front of as many new people as possible.

But if you get deeper into our stats, reels win the day:

• Reels (32% of posts): 26,864 avg impressions, 3,587 avg likes
• Carousels (16% of posts): 12,584 avg impressions, 1,273 avg likes
• Images (52% of posts): 10,962 avg impressions, 1,112 avg likes

The best feature of a single-image meme, in fact, is that it's designed to go (1) to fewer people and (2) directly to your followers.

I do not want the feast-or-famine exposure of reels for train_songz. I like the little swamp we've created meme by meme, with folks finding us through something a friend sent them rather than scrolling into one of our videos. I don't really want a ton of new followers from a random, viral reel on a dumb Always Sunny joke. I'd rather delight the ones we have. Which is why I was like whaatduhhelllll when this post took off. Static images were supposed to be our hideout. But that's what I get for riffing on a trending format, eh? For shame!

Memes as gifts

I think memes from a friend are more meaningful than an algorithm showing you a random video, because it's something another human being wanted you to see rather than something another robot wanted you to see. I see memes as a gift. There are medieval music memes, archery memes, and memes about specific bus lines in London. These pages exist and thrive because they're creating community. I try to post things on train_songz that I'd want to send to a friend. That's a meme. We both get it. Me to you.

Memes are why Train Songz has a place on the internet. Never say never, but as much as we love and believe in print, I don't think we're ever going to fully quit social media. And I don't think we're ever going to fully quit "blogging" like this here Smokestack.

I see our "content" (unholy word) as having a unique time and place:

• Print is the most important thing. This is where we put what we want to freeze in time forever. This is where art brings words to life. This is worth picking up in 20 years and enjoying.
• Blogging is for casual, random long-form writing like this. A little more constant connection between us on things that I would never soil the zine's pages with, like my musings about social media strategy.
• Social media is for memes, mostly. We also want to show off the zine and get it in front of new audiences. But its main purpose is posting things we hope you find funny / relatable / good enough to send to a friend, and we can grow the page share by share.

That's how I think about this stuff! There's a method to the memes. I put up an invisible fence around our swamp to keep out the casuals. Bring back gatekeeping!

–The Conductor