Week 7: A Rant about Social Media and How To Grow?

Hello everyone, I would like your opinion on something...

If you have been following along here, you know that my buddy and I make goofy content for our Pokémon collection channel. As of now, we exist primarily on Instagram, a little bit on Facebook, and a little bit on YouTube. Most of our content are either short skits (which we can classify as "brainrot"), videos of deals and interactions, and weekly show updates.

We have slowly been growing and, as of this week, just hit 870+ followers on Instagram. That feels like a huge achievement, but it also reminds me of just how much room we still have to grow. Our videos usually average around 3,000 views with relatively few interactions. We have watched probably hundreds of hours of guides and tutorials on how to improve these statistics, and honestly? Nothing has truly worked. So, what should we actually be doing?

A good test of where our content is being shown involves my most recent assignment. Over the past week, I curated a series of tutorials and guides designed to help newcomers get into the Pokémon hobby. I spent a good amount of time creating these resources because they addressed questions I answer almost every weekend at card shows. Surely this would be useful content, right?

Apparently not.

Granted, it has only been a couple of days, but these posts are absolutely dead in the water. I think only a handful of people have actually seen them. Meanwhile, a thirty-second video of my business partner yelling about shiny cardboard will somehow pull thousands of views.

This experience has me thinking about one of the recurring themes throughout our course: social media platforms are not neutral spaces. They actively shape what gets seen, who sees it, and what kinds of participation are rewarded. In theory, educational content that helps newcomers should thrive because it provides value to a community. In practice, the algorithms seem to prefer content that captures attention quickly, sparks emotion, or encourages immediate engagement.

The result feels somewhat paradoxical. The content I believe has the greatest educational value reaches the fewest people, while the content with the least educational value often performs the best. It makes me wonder whether successful educational content on social media needs to become entertainment first and instruction second.

Perhaps that is the real lesson I am learning here. On social media, creating useful information is only half the challenge. The other half is convincing the algorithm that your information deserves to be seen in the first place.

For those of you also exploring social media with me, have you learned any tips or tricks to help your content reach more people? More importantly, have you noticed this same tension between creating content that is valuable and creating content that is visible?