“Every day we’d be having meetings saying, ‘What was Facebook’s algorithm change today, and what can we do?’ It was always an issue,” said Jessica Rotkiewicz, who worked as a news and branded content producer at LittleThings until she was laid off last April. “At the end of the day, the company was relying on another party they couldn’t control.”
Digiday highlighted a small ecommerce company, LittleThings. As the company grew from their modest beginnings in the pet supplies industry to a social media favorite sharing inspiring content, they realized they had an unhealthy dependency on Facebook.
On a whim, Facebook could adjust their algorithm and decimate the viewership of LittleThings’ content, and, as a result: revenue.
Articles like this reinforce the need for brands to maintain their own “hub”, a controlled platform where success does not rise and fall based on outside factors like algorithms. LittleThings attempted to divest from their Facebook dependency, but they found it was too little, too late. They had fallen out of favor with “the system.”
While it is wise to use social media to reach your audience, building your entire brand on someone else’s platform will inevitably cause your brand to suffocate.
Read the article here: “Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm: How LittleThings went from social publishing darling to shutting down“