If Facebook isn’t showing you content you want to see, then find content you want to see and comment on the post. The more you do this the happier you’ll be with your home feed.
Commenting (not just liking) retrains the algorithms for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Instagram. It’s to their benefit to show you content you will interact with. You have to participate. That’s the “social” part of “social media.”
[bctt tweet=”The algorithm doesn’t rule us. We rule the algorithm by training it with our behavior.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]
You get out of social media what you put into it.
Fighting The Feed
A friend on Facebook said, that Facebook isn’t showing them the right things anymore.
I also hear the same thing from people using LinkedIn. They say LinkedIn is just junk, just sales people. They say the same thing about Twitter. Twitter is just showing you in politics. Instagram is just beauty products. We’ve all heard it.
Social Media Needs Participation
If you don’t like what you see, change it. This is where the power of commenting comes into play.
The more that you comment, the more that social network learns what you like. It’s to their advantage to show you the things that you will interact with.
If you want to have friends, you need to be a friend. This is base psychology. Friendships are more than pressing the like/heart button. Liking is good. Commenting is better.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to have friends, be a friend. This means commenting on other people’s posts, not just your own. ” username=”BridgetMWillard”]
Double-tapping doesn’t get you noticed; comments do. This is how we maintain relationships — business, personal, romantic. You have to make the effort.
How You Spend Your Time Online Matters
Think about how you behave online. Take extra time to comment and participate. You can do this in as little as five minutes a day. Be intentional. Block out your time.
You haven’t heard from your long-lost friend from high school in a while? Go to their profile, actually put their name in a search bar, and find something on their profile that you can comment on. Ideally, your comment should be something positive and kind.
On Twitter, if you haven’t seen somebody tweet in a while, be proactive. Go to their profile and look for one of their tweets, then reply to it. That’s how you comment on Twitter. You press reply.
If you’re on LinkedIn and you haven’t seen a post from one of your colleagues, go find their profile. Find something they’ve shared. Comment on it.
If you haven’t seen a friend post on “the Gram” in a while, search for their name, find one of their posts, and write more than three words.
The algorithm doesn’t rule us. We rule the algorithm by training it with our behavior.
You can’t build a network, neglect it, and then expect your LinkedIn connections to help you to find a job or get new business. You have to give to get.
In this tutorial, I explain a bit more and give examples of how to share and comment appropriately.
Keep Your Network Warm
LinkedIn is an important tool for networking and connecting with your peers and with recruiters. Don’t forget that your customers are on LinkedIn, your coworkers are on there, and potential jobs are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is for your professional life.
You know who else is on LinkedIn? The C-Suite: CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, COOs — professionals who are serious about their careers.
You get attention and engagement by showing your portfolio. You get work by being a human being who is polite and respectful.
Do I Really Need LinkedIn?
If you’re blogging, if you have a service, if you have a product, then you need LinkedIn. You should be spending about five minutes a day on this professional platform. If you want more out of it, spend five minutes in the morning and five minutes after lunch.
I’ve been helping some of my friends and clients with their LinkedIn strategy; guess what? It works.
I have! In fact, the interviews I’ve had lately are because a recruiter found me. I’ve gotten lots of work from it—far more than I have with Twitter.
— Fat Dog Creatives (@FatDogCreatives) June 28, 2020
Build LinkedIn Into Your Daily Routine
So what you want to do is build this into your habit. Sign into LinkedIn in the morning. Check all your notifications. Then find two or three things to comment on in a normal way. Don’t message people telling them you offer solutions. No one cares about your solutions.
Install the app on your phone. Do it while you’re drinking your coffee. Post it in the feed. Be helpful. Comment on other people’s posts. Be social.
Train LinkedIn With Your Behavior
“But Bridget,” you say, “all I see are posts from recruiters.” This may be because you’ve never trained LinkedIn to know what you like. The algorithm has to learn what you like based upon your participation. Contrary to popular belief, social networks can’t read your mind; they can only predict your behavior.
LinkedIn recommends content to you based upon your behavior. Meaning, whatever you click on or comment on, they will show you more of. If you’re not seeing things that you think are relevant, then you need to change your behavior. This is how you train the feed on LinkedIn. (In fact, this is how you train all of the networks.)
Comment on things that are interesting to you. Share that Harvard Business Review article you just read. Share posts from your company’s LinkedIn page. Share a job opening from a friend. Participate.
Cory Miller is looking for an assistant. Sharing this helps his reach and keeps me top-of-mind to him.
What Do You Say on LinkedIn?
People always ask me what they should say on LinkedIn? What would you say in real life? If someone has good advice, thank them. If they bring up a question in your area of expertise, answer it. If your friend got a promotion, congratulate them. It’s really not difficult.
If you want to level up, offer a polite disagreement on a post. My friend Robert Nissenbaum does this all of the time. It’s super helpful.
Don’t spam people. Don’t just write the messages to them asking for work. That’s not how you get work. That’s how you get blocked.
Keeping your network warm means being a polite, human who is interested in other humans. People remember kind people.
You can keep your network warm, stay relevant, and top-of-mind by intentionally spending your time on LinkedIn. You really can do this in five minutes a day.
I don’t want to go back and forth doing this and that and the other. Do you? If you automate, then you are at risk for set-it-and-forget-it. This could be bad. I’ve seen it go bad. The same goes for auto cross posting from platform to platform.
If you’re not checking the notifications on a platform, why even be on it? It’s like having a monologue at a party. Pretty soon, people will leave your presence. No one likes that one guy who won’t shut up about himself.
What is Your Budget?
Many agencies prefer to use a tool that is a dashboard for all of their social media profiles and engagement. These software platforms come with features that will cost you a pretty penny.
I have peers who swear by Sprout Social. That’s going to set you back between $100 and $250 a month. If it provides what your social media agency needs then go for it. If it’s just for your small business, it’d be better to hire someone.
In the past, I used Timely which changed to Minideck and both of which have been sundowned. Buffer will set you back $0 – $100 a month. That’s a fairly affordable option. The thing with Buffer is, that it needs to be filled. So, tweets still have to be curated. It’s not really helping you manage much. You can’t reply. You can’t look at lists.
Agoura Pulse will cost you a pretty penny — up to $400 a month. It allows you to assign tweets to a team member to respond to, have tweets approved, and allows you to reply. Sure, Dove uses it. But they sell more soap than you do, right?
My X Management Tools
1. X.com
When people ask what I tool I use to manage X, they’re often surprised that I say X.com. (Also, I am having a hard time getting used to saying “X” instead of “Twitter.”) This is where you create lists, set up your profile, follow and search for people. (I miss their analytics. When are they going to bring it back?) The mobile app has some of those abilities but not all.
I only get emails when someone sends me a DM and only for my account. Push notifications on social platforms are dangerous for your productivity. Use time blocking instead.
2. X Mobile App
Download the X (Twitter) mobile app so you can post on the go — or just not at your desk. Social media management isn’t a 9-5 job. I check my notifications from about 7:00 AM until 10:00 PM.
As an aside, I strongly recommend against allowing push notifications. Fit X management into your life, don’t let it interrupt yours.
3. X (Twitter) Lists
The most under-utilized feature of X (Twitter) is lists. If you want to focus your attention on certain segments that you follow, Lists is priority number one. Make the top 3 lists (customers, vendors, leaders) columns on Hootsuite (if you pay for it) and you’re 85% there.
Before Hootsuite became $250/month, Twitter plus Hootsuite were my two tools if I were stranded on a deserted island with high-speed WiFi and Diet Coke. If I get to a point where I manage that many X accounts again, I’ll go back to Hootsuite in a heartbeat. AI put a huge dent into my business. But that’s another topic.
4. X (Twitter) Analytics
Twitter’s analytics ware so awesome back in the day — they used to have demographic data. But that’s the thing with privacy. It’s good for users, bad for marketers. They were unavailable from October 2023 but it looks like they’re back now as “Account Analytics.” See screenshots below from 2/1/25. (This is a good reason to update older posts.)
I thought "Twitter Analytics" was gone (last known Sept 2023).
You have to turn them on and I’m going to guess it’s because I’m paying for my account. I pair this with a Google Sheet to track the five main metrics of tweets, impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers.
I used to like the tweets to profile visit ratio as the best metric ( above .20.). The profile visits is important because it means that a user saw your tweet, clicked on your username/handle, and then looked at your profile.
5. Hootsuite Pro ($$$)
When I was rocking and rolling managing 10+ Twitter accounts, Hootsuite was my “X management tool” of choice. I put that in quotes because there is no one tool that does everything I need or want. If there was one tool that actually helps you manage, it’s Hootsuite. I pay for Pro because I manage more than 3 accounts.
Hootsuite Pro will set you back $249 a month. It is worth every penny if you have that many accounts. Every. Red. Cent.
Some people like TweetDeck but I haven’t liked them since Twitter purchased them. One of the bonuses about Hootsuite is that the mobile app has the same organization as the web app. This is key to making use of lists as well as hashtag or domain searches.
6. Google Sheets for X
I use Google Sheets for two reasons: 1) basic reporting; and 2) content curation for my Basic and Pro X (Twitter) plans. Also, sometimes a platform can lose data. Don’t just rely on them. Have a backup. People who care about metrics can read spreadsheets.
I aggregate the values from Twitter’s analytics in a Google Sheet.
7. Who.Unfollowed.Me
Who.Unfollowed.Me is now Fedica. Until X removes the requirement to have a 1:1 following:follower ratio to grow your account beyond 2,000, 5,000, 9,000, 14,000, and 19,000 followers, I have to unfollow accounts who don’t follow back. This is why I like who.unfollowed.me. If you have people listed, you can still pay attention to them in your Hootsuite columns.
It’s pretty rude to build your brand on the back of followers and then dump them so that your vanity shows you have 20,000 followers and you follow 47. If that’s the message you want to send your followers, just buy a bunch of spam people. It’s social media. Don’t be a jerk.
This is a good place to plug my book: Keys to Being Social. It focuses on the behavior that makes you successful online. The platforms change and evolve but the behavior doesn’t. It’s $10. You’ll thank me later.
8. Revive Old Post Pro ($$$)
Revive Old Post is a WordPress plugin that is free and has a paid version. Because X decided to charge more for software to use their API, this became more expensive ($200/yr as of 2/1/25) the same way Hootsuite did.
I only used this for my own business. This is something that is nice-to-have. I don’t currently have the client work to support it. As soon as I do, I’m buying it again. My favorite part is the post-variations. Also, you can use it to post to your Google Business Profile. That was really handy.
I recommend it for clients who want to ensure their blog posts are being cycled on X. I don’t recommend using it for other platforms as the culture on those platforms does not support repetition.
My settings are somewhere between 7.5 and 37.5 hours. I like odd numbers so that it’s not tweeting at the exact same time — every time. You’ll get in the data rut that your best time to tweet is at 4:00 PM on Thursday. It’s because you only tweet at 4:00 PM on Thursday.
9. Google Analytics for X
You should always look at your website’s Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming from X and what the time on site is. When I start a new client, my promise is 10% lift in overall website traffic each quarter.
As a social media manager, I rarely have access to a client’s GA. If you do, try to get time (what used to be called) on-site at 2 minutes or more. It means people are reading.
In GA4, it would be in Pages and Screens: Average Engagement Time Per User. I’ll include a screenshot of my analytics. I didn’t work my business very much in 2024 as I had to take a full-time position at TJ Maxx to supplement my income. But it shows you where to look. (2025 is going to be my year!)
Also, I wouldn’t worry about the bounce rate too much. If you answered the question for the reader, there is no reason for them to stay.
Remember that t.co is still the link shortener for X. So if you see that as a referral source, it’s coming from X (Twitter). I say this because I once had a client who didn’t know that and thought no one was clicking on links from X.
My time on site is low for Twitter because I am only posting every 37.5 hours right now. If I posted more, it would go up. I also haven’t published in 4 weeks.
10. Bitly Chrome Extension
I am a huge fan of bit.ly and shortened links in general in tweets. This makes it much easier for people to retweet with the copy / paste method and looks much better.
I talk about the reply button a lot. So many people (I blame COVID) simply respond to comments they get on their own posts. Which is the baseline of polite behavior.
But to do real outreach and growth, you should comment on other people’s posts. Do it on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, etc. This opens you up to another audience. You can have complete, productive, inspiring conversations with other people on a thread you don’t own. It’s just like walking up to a group of people at a networking event. You didn’t start the conversation, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get something out of it.
Now Defunct Twitter Card Validator (Used to be Tool #4)
Twitter’s Card Validator is sadly defunct. I really loved how it ensured a post pulled up the right image when using a link to your website. In fact, (Meta) Facebook’s Sharing Debugger doesn’t seem to work to refresh Open Graph images either.
X Management Tools Wrapped Up
X management isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to have tools that actually help you achieve your goals. It’s important to be a practitioner; stay on X as much as possible. This allows you to see any UI/UX and feature changes that a platform implements. That affects your tactics.
For example, Twitter added scheduling just to the dot com site back in the day. That’s pretty amazing. You can also use GIFs when you’re on Twitter native.
Try not to rely on too many tools outside of the native platform. You’ll become so distant that you are at risk of being out of touch and tone deaf.
When you write a blog post it’s more than just an essay that you used to write for school projects. You need to write in a way that’s educational, informative, and slightly entertaining. This is marketing copy; it’s not a term paper.
A blog post is not a journalistic article. People are used to seeing news articles and writing that way. Marketing copy is more like an infomercial. You want to have consumable, bite-sized chunks of content that people can scan.
The Video Tutorial
Readability Matters
Making sure the reading level isn’t above ninth grade is important. Newspapers aim for 5th grade, maybe the Wall Street Journal aims for 12th grade. Know your audience. For the most part, people come to your website from an article that you shared on social media. They scan it to see if it’s worth reading. This is why headings are so important. Also headings help with SEO which is how you’re found on the internet.
Headings seem to confuse a lot of people because they think it’s a way of formatting their texts. Headings are for organizational structure and it falls under the category of Semantic HTML. This is important, not just for screen readers which is an accessibility issue, but also for SEO. People will scan your website; they don’t read the whole thing.
Know Your Audience
Understanding user behavior when reading articles is really important. In Google analytics, you can find out how many people are coming to your website from mobile vs. desktop. You can also find out how long they’re reading from each. This should inform you on how long your post should be.
For SEO, you’ll want at least 300 words in your blog post. I generally write 300 to 500 words; sometimes 750 is my sweet spot but it really depends upon that article. I’ve gone as high as 1,200 to 1,800 words on it in a blog post on this site because it couldn’t be broken up. However, if you are writing that much, consider breaking it up into one or two parts — maybe even three.
Short Content Brings People Back
Breaking up your topics and to consumable pieces allows your reader to come to your site multiple times. Think about your blog as hors d’oeuvres at a party. You don’t want people sitting down and eating a meal and holding a plate. No. You want them to have a little snack, move around, keep talking, and enjoy the party.
So in the same way, you want people to enjoy the atmosphere of your website. This means the content that’s on there should be fun; it should be funny; it should be useful.
How Many Headings Do I Need?
Headings should break up about 150-300 words. They should make sense in the context. It should be a heading then a paragraph; a heading then a paragraph, and so on.
So, right now I’m typing this with voice typing in a Google doc. I’m going to make a video that shows you how to take text it’s already written edit it was Hemingwayapp.com. Then add in your headings and then paste it into your WordPress website with the classic editor enabled.
Semantic HTML Matters
You can write your blog post with semantic HTML. (Semantic is the grammar of HTML). Headings use semantic order which is H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the title. H2 should be all the headings and H3 would be a heading under an H2.
This is similar to an outline. Roman numeral one and then the points on the Roman numeral one will be 1 to 3. Then the points under number 1 are a, b, c. That’s how headings work in websites.
Embed Videos In Your Blog Posts
One of the best parts about recording video is that you give people another way to see your content. They can see your expressions, they can hear your tone of voice, and that makes a huge difference. Remember, people do business with other people that they know like and trust. This is why having a video with captions and a transcript is so important.
How Do You Get Captions?
One of my favorite tools for adding subtitles and getting a transcript is Temi.com. You can upload the video to Temi.com or you can give them a URL or to a video on Facebook or YouTube. They will provide a transcript based on artificial intelligence (AI). This costs $0.15 a minute and is very accurate.
Once the order is ready there are orange words in the transcript that you can change. It’s important to look over your transcript to make sure that any technical words are spelled correctly.
Why Does Video Matter?
Repurposing content, such as a video that you created, is a great way to add a blog post to your website. If your website is on WordPress you can embed the video right in the blog post by copying the URL or link from YouTube.
What WordPress does is it renders that link into a video that people can play right there in the blog article. Don’t worry about views because YouTube counts embedded views just like views on your channel.
Quickly Write and Publish
You should be able to do this work with the writing, a quick edit, adding headings, your featured image, and publishing within an hour. The more you do it the better it’ll get. The cool thing is when you get a transcript from Temi.com, you can actually add the transcript at the very bottom of the blog post. As a bonus, you have more words for Google to read as they crawl your website.
What Do I Do After the Post is Published?
After you publish, submit the URL to Google Analytics to make sure that it indexes the page. Scrape it with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and check it with Twitter’s Card Validator. This will ensure that it shows up correctly when the post is shared on social media.
In my ebook called “If You Don’t Mind Your Business Who Will?” I give actionable tips on how to block your time, how to keep a journal of pain points, as well as affirmations and prompts for each month. Spending about two hours a month should give you one published article on your site.
The more time you spend writing and Publishing, the better the more healthy your website will be.
After you block your time, stick to it. It doesn’t matter which tool or app you use. The best tool is the one that you consistently use. Choose something and stick to it.
“You train people how to treat you.” Mel Robbins
A month later, audit your blocking and make changes. This is structure with grace — not a prison sentence.
