Signal from Sam Parham - trend translator, content engine guy.

Somebody messaged me last week saying they'd been following me for months and wanted to work together.

I looked them up, the way you do. Never liked a post, never commented, never shared anything. As far as every tool I own is concerned, that person had never been near me, and they'd read more of my stuff than half my comments section.

Everyone I work with has that happen and treats it as a fluke. It's most of the internet now.

Your numbers are probably down this year. So are mine on a couple of accounts, and so are everyone's, and we've all spent eighteen months blaming algorithm changes for it. The drought is real.

The bit nobody checks is whether the watching went with it. It didn't. It moved.

There's a name for where it went. Dark social: everything people share, recommend and decide where nothing can measure it. A link in a DM. A screenshot into a group chat. Your name on a call you'll never hear about.

In 2013 a data scientist at Facebook and a researcher at Carnegie Mellon looked at something nobody outside the company could see. What people typed and then binned before posting.

Facebook's own numbers, 3.9 million people, seventeen days. Seventy-one percent of them did it, and the bigger the audience for a post, the more likely it died in the box. It was never about what they had to say. It was about who'd see them say it.

Adam Mosseri said it out loud about his own product last year: public posting is falling across the whole industry, and more gets shared into DMs than anywhere else.

So the person deciding whether to hire you is never going to like your post. Liking it is a public statement about them. Forwarding it to their business partner costs them nothing.

I put a video out about this a few weeks ago, and the best comment on it came from somebody who'd done over a hundred thousand dollars of work with an agency this year, for Lexus, and realised on the last job that they and their main contact weren't even following each other on Instagram. Six figures, months of work, no public trace that either of them knew the other existed.

Read your comments. Reply properly. Half my ideas come out of what people ask me in there. Just stop using how many of them there are as the mark out of ten, because that number counts the people comfortable being seen agreeing with you in public, and says nothing about the person reading in silence with a budget.

Here's the ladder I use instead. Likes make you feel good, and that's the whole job. Saves create memory. Shares create conversations. Search creates demand, because somebody typing your name has already decided. Demand builds a business. Likes never did.

So before your next post, swap the question. Instead of asking whether it'll get likes, ask whether somebody would save it, send it to one person, or remember your name because of it in six weeks.

Being known was never about collecting the most likes. It's about being the person people think of first, and those are completely different jobs.

Hit reply and tell me the last thing you sent someone in a DM instead of posting. I want to see what travels when nobody's watching.

Co-founder, 1DS Collective

INSIDE AUTHORITYOS

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THIS WEEK

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Write it down. Let that be your compass.

P.S.

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