Decoding social media algorithms: the path to creating engaging content in 2020

Social media algorithms are selection and ranking algorithms that help consumers experience better content. These algorithms have been blamed in the past few years for the creation of “filter bubbles” and other phenomena in social media. This presentation analyzes the top 5 platforms with producers and consumers of content to understand the impact of curation algorithms. on the number of friends each consumer has and the quality of content created by each producer. Our model takes into account both vertical and horizontal differentiation and analyzes three different types of algorithms. We find that without algorithmic curation, the number of followers a brand has and the quality of content on each platform are strategic complements. We identify different algorithms on the major social networks that focuses on filtering low quality items that results in higher quality of content, thus empowering social media content creators a path to play within these algorithms in order to create engaging, sharable, and viral content on key social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.