In today’s world, if you’re not on social media, you don’t exist. Whether as a business or an individual, the current level of interconnectivity demands a social media presence. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never liked it. Since the days of Hi5, I’ve always been the last to open a profile, the only one who hasn’t seen that meme.
For better or worse, I’ve never felt pressured to meet the expectations of sharing my life. It makes me anxious to think about posting a photo to the cyber void, so I don’t. However, there’s a real need for visibility as a business. And there’s no escaping it.
Whether you’re an ice cream shop, a plumber, or an interior designer, you need to exist in the social media world. Few businesses today have maxed out their productive capacity through personal contacts or local demand. In another era, you paid for advertising in certain spaces and continued with your professional work: serving ice cream, fixing pipes, or designing spaces. But social media demands constant “value” content creation. And honestly, the more you try to define that concept, the more overwhelming it gets.
Content must appeal to a niche, solve a problem, capture interest, be about them… yet, in the end, it’s all evaluated by an algorithm.
The need to post daily or regularly takes precedence over the desire to improve as a professional. Now, we invest more time learning to use Canva than improving the ice cream recipe. And although the algorithm demands originality, paradoxically, it promotes repetition.
As entrepreneurs or creatives, we navigate social media in search of clues, tips, or simply inspiration to generate content constantly. We discover trends, stories, formats, and much more. The content that appears follows the formula, meeting the algorithm’s requirements.
YouTuber Mr. Beast has developed a method that works perfectly on that platform. The issue is that he’s not producing new YouTubers with fresh ideas but rather Mr. Beast copies. Some of his tips include consuming only YouTube, avoiding platforms like Netflix, which reduces external influences and limits creativity to a single medium. Additionally, he follows a set storytelling template, repeating narrative structures. From cinema, he only borrows certain cinematography techniques like quick cuts, bright colors, and spectacular actions. Attention-grabbing, but not very artistic.
When you take inspiration from the same source and use the same formula, creativity and originality end up diluted; video after video, post after post, spontaneity and unique proposals fade away. People aren’t learning to master a craft or technique; success standards are so defined that creatives can’t afford to follow their curiosity because they risk breaking the formula and falling into invisibility.
In today’s capitalist world, this is a risk that few creatives, whose livelihood depends on their art, are willing to take. And what about businesses? They invest large amounts, if they can afford it, in marketing strategies, hoping to hire the specialist with enough talent and knowledge to bring a final spark of originality to an oversaturated scene.
Social media rewards originality and creativity, but it doesn’t nurture them; it slowly dilutes them.
The challenge, then, seems to be protecting our curiosity from being overly shaped by the formula. Protecting our ignorance, seeking inspiration in the everyday, and resisting the urge to create content daily. Ultimately, prioritizing quality over quantity without compromising our originality.
Sounds easy, I know.
This entry was originally written for Mientras Tanto by Claudia Pons in spanish. Check it out!