Guides
Social media holidays statistics: what can be counted
Social media holidays statistics: the days, their publishers and the figures that exist — plus why participation numbers cannot honestly be published.
Desk
Buyers Desk
What separates the options in social media algorithms, trends and outages, judged on what they do rather than what they claim.
Industry
Recommendation systems: six cases, including two audiences that cancel out
Six recommendation cases with names attached, from YouTube's cold start to TikTok's regional gate, and the flat average that hides two opposed audiences.
Features
Why there is no honest list of ranking signals, and the four stages instead
Why nobody can give you a list of ranking signals, plus the four jobs every ranking system has and how to read a symptom back to the stage it belongs to.
Reviews
Feature updates updates: staged rollouts on social platforms
Feature updates updates 2027: how social platforms stage a new feature with flags, rings and holdbacks, why rolling out cannot be checked, and how to measure.
Reviews
Recommendation systems platforms compared: what US platforms actually deploy
Six US platforms compared by retrieval stage, ranking signal and public detail, plus what each architecture forces a publisher to do before committing.
Reviews
Annual trend reports timeline: find the field date
The annual trend reports timeline runs from design to publication. Why the cover date is not the real date, and the three places to find the field date.
Costs
The risks of going viral arrive in a predictable order
Viral trends risks in the order they arrive: the mismatched audience, the unreadable baseline, and the pressure to repeat that forms afterward.
Maintenance
Viral reach: six properties that decide whether strangers ever see it
Viral trends platforms and the structural routes to strangers: six properties that decide whether wide spread is possible, and how to read a surface.
Maintenance
5 details of feature updates statistics people miss
Five overlooked details explain why feature update statistics mislead, from missing change registers to staged rollouts and self-selected surveys.
Rules
How to run ranking signals research on your social posts
Ranking signals research on your own social account: choosing a signal to test, building a split that cannot flatter you, and reading the result honestly.