#528: The slow and subtle social media shift (that's speeding up) - Tash Corbin, Heart-Centred Business Podcast

Full article and links available at: tashcorbin.com/528

Let me start this episode by saying: I’m not 100% sure everyone’s going to love what I have to say, but this is an important topic if you want to make informed decisions for your business moving forward. We need to talk about a slow but subtle shift I’ve seen happening on social media—one that’s really starting to speed up. I promise, this won’t be as vague as it sounds.

If you’re trying to grow an audience on social media, feeling frustrated by slowing audience growth, or thinking about how you might need to shift your strategy, then you’ll want to stick with me for this one.

The Ever-Changing Social Media Landscape

Change is a constant in our lives, but nowhere is that more clear than in the world of social media. The landscape for business owners is always shifting: new trends, algorithm updates, platform tweaks—those changes come at us fast. Sometimes things like links are suddenly deprioritised or new features like reels take over. But running beneath those fast shifts is something slower, subtler, and it’s really starting to pick up pace.

What’s the social media shift? It’s the very real shortening timeframe between signing up for a platform and the point when you “need” to spend real money on ads to get seen. And honestly, I know a lot of you aren’t going to love that.

...read the full article at: tashcorbin.com/528

Join us in Noosa at the Heart-Centred Business Conference on 2-3rd September!

Find out more and secure your ticket at: tashcorbin.com/conference

Transcript

0:31

Yeah. Not 100% sure everyone's gonna love what I have to say in today's podcast episode, but I think it's an important thing for us to talk about so you can make an informed decision moving forward. And it's about a slow but subtle shift I've seen happening on social media and it's getting faster and faster and I'll explain in the episode, but in essence it's a shift that I think we need to readjust our timeframes around. Now that sounds really like vague and click baity, but it will make sense when we get into the episode. So if you in particular are wanting to grow your audience on social media, you feel like your social media audience growth is not what it used to be and you're looking to make some adjustments to your strategy or you'd like to know what your options are. This is going to be a helpful episode. It's episode number 528 of the Heart Centered Business Podcast, which means you can find all the relevant links and the show notes for today's episode over@tashcorbyn.com 528 so let's dive into this one because I don't want to leave you dangling and wondering what on earth I'm talking about. I want to get straight into the detail. Let's do it. Hello, I'm Tash Corbyn, a business strategist and mentor based on the Sunshine coast in Australia. The mission of this podcast is to help Heart Centered entrepreneurs to make more money and in doing so change the world for the better. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gubbi, Gubbi and Djinnaburra people. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Now they say the only constant in our lives is change and I think that's particularly relevant on social media. The landscape for business owners in particular is changing so consistently. We see trends, we see changes to the algorithm, we see updates to the platform and the different features and functions very regularly. And a lot of those small changes are come in quite quickly. So we see links being taken away or links being deprioritized in the algorithm. We see new features being added like reels, and then the take up of those features is very fast. But the whole time since social media began, there has been a more subtle shift, a more slow moving shift that has been getting faster and faster the longer social media exists. And that shift is the shortening of time frames before you need to start spending money on ads on the platform. Which is why I Think a lot of people won't be happy about that because they don't want to invest in ads on social media. There's lots and lots of reasons why people don't want to do it. They don't love the people that they're giving the money to. They don't have any evidence that it will work. They've done it before and it didn't work. There's a lot of complexity to running ads, especially if you do it the right way, that people who teach ads tell you is the right way and they're invested in telling you that the right way is a very complicated way so that they can sell you something to help you do it the right way, just quietly. But I totally understand the resistance to running ads on social media and I also resisted it for a long time. I ran ads in the first six months or so of my business. I did an experiment in running ads once and it ate a thousand dollars in 24 hours. And I didn't run ads again for another four years. So if there's someone who's a little shy of running ads because of a negative experience, I can put my hand up and say, absolutely, that is me as well. Before we go into what choices we have and how to deal with this, as we move forward in social media land and as business owners, the first thing I want to do is just quickly walk through the kind of accepted life cycle of a social platform. And this is is broadly accepted as a lifecycle of a social platform because we see it not only in social media and technology based social platforms, but it's actually been a recurring theme throughout history when something has mass appeal. So if we think about it through the lens of social media specifically though, the first stage is make it good for users, right? So when Facebook was first created, the driver was to get as many people using it as possible. In order to do that, you want to make it really powerful for the users. You want to solve a problem that they have or help them achieve a specific goal. You want to create something that everyone wants to tell their friends to be part of as well, that if you're not on it, you're missing out on something as a user. So step stage one is always user focused, user driven. But stage two is now we have a large scale audience here. We need to monetize and make it good for advertisers. So new features get added to the social platform, such as advertising opportunities, but also features that business owners and advertisers might use social media. So even on Platforms where there isn't an ad feed, for example, you still see features that work well for advertisers and work well for businesses, because businesses drive the engagement on the platform. Businesses are monetizing there. And so businesses are the ones that have a vested interest in keeping people using this platform, especially if they are making sales on that platform. Now, the most obvious way of doing that, of course, is advertising. But we have seen other examples of ways that platforms have been made great for business without necessarily just being as basic as advertising. Now, the next phase is that we need to make it better for advertisers. So we're going to do that slightly to the detriment of the users. So if you remember when ads first started to come into your Facebook newsfeed or when the algorithm started, you might remember feeling frustrated. You're not seeing content that you want to see anymore. Oh, this feels like I'm getting ads thrown at me every fifth or sixth post. I think in the first few years of ads being on Facebook, it was a guarantee that would be no more than one in every 20 posts from recollection. But you know, they then make it better for advertisers and then they put more ads in there. And advertisers are using it far more prolifically because it's an audience they can access in a new way for a two way conversation. And the ads are relatively cheap because they're far more targeted. The data that we are getting access to as advertisers is far beyond what we might be able to access otherwise. And therefore it's becoming better and better for advertisers, but to the detriment of users. But then as users start engaging with the app less or being on the social platforms less, we also need to make sure that we're still getting as much money as we can out of these advertisers for as long as we can. And so the usability for advertisers starts to decline as well. Now, in some cases it can be clawed back, but in others it ends up being to the demise of the platform itself. An example of that was Periscope, which did get bought out, but ultimately prioritized advertiser needs over user needs far too early. And people were pretty quick to let it go and come back to Facebook when Facebook lives were added to the platform. So ultimately, a social platform in its life cycle ends up getting to a point where it's not as good for advertisers, it's not as good for users, it's not as Good for those who are there to make money. It's not as good for those who are there to socialise. So the reason why I talk about this as the slow and subtle shift is because it needs to be slow and it needs to be subtle. And in order for people to still stay on the platform, it's on purpose. So if they were to really quickly make changes to the detriment of the user experience, you'll see a drop in people engaging with the platforms, which is something that we have seen in the first quarter of 2026 with Facebook. The prolific amount of AI and bot driven content and comments has led to, for the first time in a long time, the average time per user on platforms to start to decrease. And my prediction is we'll probably see that continue if significant changes are not made to the platform. But we need this to happen subtly and slowly because for the platform, which is of course there to make money, they want to maximize the profitability of the platform. So we often see the detriment of users by the changing of interfaces or the addition of new business tools as a more more visible change to the platform. So, like when the algorithm first started, we noticed it. When they brought in ads for the first time, we noticed it. When they increased the number of ads, hundred posts, we noticed it. When they started doing not just advertised content, but suggested content, we noticed it. Right. So as a user, the changes are often far more noticeable. But as an advertiser or as a business owner, sometimes we don't even notice the decline. So an example of this that I would use is the reach that you get when posting in Facebook groups. So I think that there is a very powerful reason why Facebook allowed people posting in groups to see the reach of their post in those groups and then took that away. And I think that a big part of that is that there are a lot of business owners who engage with each other in Facebook groups, and there are a lot of people who were posting in those groups thinking, well, you know, this group's got 10,000 members, so that's a large scale community I'm getting my content in front of. And when they saw the reality that they were only reaching a tiny portion of that group with their content, they were posting less often. So I don't even know if you spotted this, but this feature was available between 2021 and 2022. So it was rolled out in different countries at different times. But there was a short period of time in the heart centered community, which is the one that I facilitate. We have over 30,000 members. So there was a short period of time where when you posted in the heart centered group, you could see how much reach your post was getting. And it was only there for about three, four weeks and then it disappeared again as an ad. Oh, sorry, just banged my elbow. As an admin of the group, I could still see it. So I can still see it to this day. And here and there I do Facebook lives and posts and updates into the heart centered community, letting people know what I'm seeing in trends of reach for that community. Because I want that transparency for people to be able to see just how much that reach has been impacted. So I don't know the inner workings of Facebook. All I can do is make observations from someone who's prolifically on Facebook, hosts a large scale community on Facebook, advertises regularly on Facebook. I'm there, I'm also in helping dozens of clients with their Facebook presence, Instagram as well, and with their strategies. And some of them have their own groups, some of them engage in other people's groups. So I see a lot of what, especially business owners like mine where it's service based business or selling digital products or you know, that sort of micro business where it's a personal brand or it's a small scale business even if it's not a personal brand. I see a lot of those kinds of businesses and what's going on for them on social media. And so it's on purpose that we have this very subtle shift in how well some of these tools, tools work for people who are trying to monetize on these social platforms. So there'll be subtle changes to the way that you can be rewarded as part of the creator fund. So there are still some creators on Facebook, Instagram, other social platforms who are monetized per engagement or per view for their content on social media. But it used to be that you could access that or be part of that when you reached a certain number of followers. That was then changed to a certain level of engagement. Now it's restricted to by invitation only. In a lot of cases, um, I'm not sure if new people are being invited into it or if it's just existing and established ones. But I do have several clients who have the ability to monetize their videos on Facebook in particular and be paid when those videos reach a certain number of people, a certain number of views, get a certain level of engagement. They might be rewarded financially for that by the Meta Creator Fund. What I've seen from them is that slowly and very Subtly, the money they are making is declining even if their engagement views reach are growing. We're also seeing more and more videos being flagged as ineligible because they have attracted a bunch of bot comments. And the implication is that the creator has somehow paid for those comments, which is not true. But trying to appeal an AI driven decision about why you're ineligible is almost always fruitless. So we're definitely seeing a big shift there for people who are monetizing on Facebook. But again, it's big, but it's slow and subtle over time. If you post on a Facebook page, even use a creator profile on Facebook, or you're posting on an Instagram profile, you'll likely have also noticed that over time you're getting less and less engagement, less reach, there's more competition for that viewership. And there's also seems to be certain types of content that just don't seem to be reaching your audience at all. That whole idea of being shadow banned or certain types of content somehow flagging something and that's just doesn't seem to get the reach that everything else does. So we are definitely seeing that shift on pages and profiles as well. And again, it's probably been a little more visible for us to see that, but still fairly slow and fairly subtle. And the big one for me is the reach and engagement in Facebook groups. So this to give you some numbers started for me a few years ago where I noticed that the I can see all the reach of every post in the Heart center community. We have over 30,000 members in there and the reach of posts in that community were usually on average well above 1000 per post. So I found it really fascinating. About 2022, 23 I was sharing that when I post in the group as the post, as the group host, I was struggling to get reach of over 500 people per post which but it looked like everyone else who was engaging and posting in there, so long as they were there fairly regularly, their posts were getting over a thousand reach. And I thought that was really interesting. So I was seeing this difference between everyone else's posts versus my own. And that then continued. But I started to notice a really big decline from 2023 into 2024 and again 2526. So 2024 there were probably the top 20 to 30 people in the group were still getting average reach of about 1500-2000 people per post. People who were a bit more flighty in and out of the group were getting reach of about 500 people per post. And my own posts were getting 150 to 200 reach per post. And of course, that was only posts that had at least one comment or a little bit of engagement. It wasn't posts that had nothing, but posts that got a couple of likes. And a comment would very often have really good reach. And I mean, we could call it really good reach. At the end of the day, it's a group of over 30,000 people. We're not even reaching 10% of those people. But for the opportunity to borrow this group audience and post in there, it was definitely worthwhile, even if you are posting fairly haphazardly now, flash forward to the start of 2026, and I noticed that most posts were getting less than 100 reach. Less than 100. So it has declined and declined and declined. And that's not publicly visible to the people posting. But I do try and update these things in the group as often as I can. And also that's why I'm doing this podcast episode, because I want to talk about it in a bit more depth. So in March, I. As part of my Tashmas, my birthday celebrations, I. On one of the days, I did a help thread, and we actually had several different help threads. One was, do you have an offer under a hundred bucks? One was, are you looking for help with something? You're looking to hire someone or engage a provider? One was, do you want to do a swap? See, there was one about collaborations. There was a bunch of different help threads, and there were quite a lot of people who engaged with them at first. So I think in the first three or four hours, one of them had 90 comments, but its reach was 95 people. So only the people who saw it and engaged with it immediately were shown that post. Everyone else didn't get to see it. And so I ended up doing a post on my page to say, hey, we've got help threads going in the group. Make sure you come and engage with them. I also emailed my mailing list to get them to go and engage with those posts and share something in there. And even with all of that extra effort of directing people to these specific posts, the number of people those posts reached never exceeded 5% more than the number of people who actually commented on it and engaged with it. So the reach, the organic reach of posts within Facebook groups now is so limited that even if, you know, you used to be able to get a few people engaging with a post and it would naturally bring up the reach of that post within the community, even that is not doing anything these days. And I Actually was on a call with a client recently and she was commenting that she wasn't getting the engagement she had seen previously in the Heart Centered community and other groups. And so we literally went through from my account where I could see the reach of all the posts. And I was saying to her, look, this post, 12 comments, reach of 21 people this post, 4 comments, reach of 18 people this post, no comments, reach of 6 people. So the organic reach within Facebook communities is being wildly eroded. And so this is yet another shift we are seeing towards it's not as good for advertisers and it's not as good for users. Sometimes the shift is not subtle enough and we see a correction. And I remember it was 2022, we had an algorithm update in January that significantly reduced the organic reach of content on Facebook pages. And a lot of people actually ended up abandoning their Facebook page, giving up on posting on it consistently because it just felt like it wasn't even worth it. There was a huge push for people to move over to a creator profile or a professional profile, which was another on purpose thing from the social platform. But ultimately there was a correction to the algorithm a few months later and anyone who had continued to post on their Facebook page actually was rewarded with a huge surge in organic reach. And that organic reach of Facebook pages these days, they don't mess with it as much. I've noticed since then. They really learned their lesson. Now some of the reports coming out of Facebook, but also those industry insider kind of newsletters and articles suggested that Facebook really felt the pinch. They were really stung by this reduction of organic reach of posts on Facebook pages. And that was mostly due to the fact that a large portion of Facebook's revenue comes from small scale advertisers. And one of the reasons why people jump into paid advertising is because they have success with organic strategies on a social platform and they want to accelerate the results of those strategies. So Facebook learned that if they didn't give businesses the opportunity to make some money organically, and they didn't give businesses the opportunity to grow an audience organically, the odds of that company, that business advertising paying for advertising were significantly lower. And so for that first quarter after the algorithm update, they saw the biggest portion of ad revenue drop was from first time advertisers and advertisers who spent less than $200 a month on advertising. And so we saw a big algorithm update in April of that year and anyone who had still been posting consistently on their page was rewarded with this big surge in reach and So I think based on that, we will still see this slow decline of organic reach on our Facebook pages, but it is going to be less abrupt and we probably won't see a big downward shift like we'd seen back then. And I've definitely noticed that for myself, I feel like my page reach reach has stayed fairly consistent and if there is a drop, it's fairly subtle over time, especially when I'm posting at least once a day, I'm seeing that my organic reach is still fairly stable. And that's really interesting because my organic reach in my own Facebook group, which has three times as many people, so I have 10,000 ish followers on Facebook. I have 30,000 plus people in my group. I still reach more people on my page than in my group with my posts. And people don't believe me a lot of the time when I say that, but that is absolutely true. And that has been the case since well before that algorithm update. I would say since 2020, my reach on my page has outperformed my reach in my own group, and the group has been at least three times the number of people compared to my page. And so that has been really interesting to see it change over the years. So we do sometimes see those sharp corrections, but I don't think we're going to see anything particularly sharp happening on pages and profiles. It will continue to be this very slow, very subtle shift because Facebook Meta wants to continue to maximise profitability and income moving forward. Now, what does this all mean? Now, right now, what I say is just go with it and feel into when you might feel like you've got the confidence that what you're sharing on social media is something that your audience wants and likes. You're getting some engagement and you can see a line of sight between what you're doing on social media and the income you're generating in your business. Now, that line of sight for me is when I am consistent on social media and I grow my mailing list from that. My mailing list growth significantly contributes to my income, my revenue in my business. If I'm not growing my mailing list, the income I'm generating from social media is not reliable and certainly is not sustainable just from social posts alone. So my social media is always part of this greater content ecosystem. It has a very important role to play in that content ecosystem. It's still one of my most consistent spaces to reach new audiences, to grow my mailing list and to have touch points with my audience to make sales, to nurture our relationship, nurture our connections, but I am more consistently investing in ads for list growth to ensure that I am continuing to grow the part of my business that has a direct relationship to sales and that is my mailing list and especially my leads for my lead magnets that have a direct upsell like when I'm launching a program, launching a product, launching an event. So I say go with it. I would definitely recommend that you look to paid ads sooner rather than later, but I don't want this to be through the lens of panic. I want this instead to be through the lens of strategic decision making and strategic simplicity. You can jump through eleventy billion hoops to try and maintain or grow your organic reach on social platforms, but ultimately the writing is on the wall for organic reach on these platforms. And therefore is it actually better for you to learn how to do the fancy reel, how to do the new model of video content, how to start group chats that people can opt in and out of and DMs and all this kind of stuff to create an AI help bot that spams people when they first follow you? Or is it simply a case of it would be far more simple and actually cost you less resources overall to invest a small amount of money in paid advertising? When I think about the time and energy that I have put into creating new types of content, experimenting with different algorithm things with learning how to do short form video, learning how to, you know, use trends and be on trend with content and messaging, I'm very glad that all of that for me has been through the lens of just learning it for the fun of it. And I don't rely on it for my business because my baseline strategies have continued to work long term and I am in a very privileged position to mostly be learning about a lot of the new stuff in order to be able to answer client questions and to make informed content like this to help my audience rather than I need this for my own business. One of the reasons why I don't have to be so beholden to algorithms, to these trends, to what is working now on social media, is because I know that deep down the one thing that never changes is the algorithm's job. The algorithm's number one job is to put content in front of users that they will engage with. And knowing that that's the algorithm's job, I have just consistently focused on creating content that I know my audience will engage with. I know that people who are within my niche will find that helpful. We'll find that interesting. We'll want to know more about that we'll join this particular conversation. And because of that, I've never bought into some of those more how to trick the algorithm approaches, how to do the dance with the algorithm. Because like, my brain doesn't like to have to follow a set of 75 rules with every single post that I put up on the Internet. Things like put the link in the comments. I don't do that because if I have to put the link in the comments to put a post on social media, that is a source of friction because I can't schedule it unless I have an external scheduler that also schedules the first comment. And also I don't want to force my audience to have to do that. So I've always just included the link in my post. And because of that, I have trained the algorithm that when I include a link in my posts, it's just as engaging for my audience as when there's no link and I'm going to keep doing it. And so I don't see as significant a drop in the reach of those posts with links in them as others do. I know people who have spent years putting the link in the comments and having people say, oh, I can't find the comment with the link in it and finding all of these dramas with it. And then when they've tried to go back to, I just want my post to just include all of the information. The difference between a post with a link in it versus a post without a link in it is mag is huge, right? It's massive. And I also know that if they persist for about 60 days, that gap becomes smaller and smaller. So I've always been this way, probably a little bit defiant about it all. But ultimately I need social media to feel easy for me and I need it to be something that I can nail consistently in order for me to actually use it. And so it's kind of like I do it my way or I don't do it. I do it in a way that I can sustain or I just am not going to do it. I know that about myself and I actually think that that's held me in really good stead and that's helped me to treat social media like the tool that it is for my business and consistently still get value from using that tool. So I think for now I would say build your mailing list as quickly as you can. If you've stepped back from doing things that accelerate your mailing list growth, like running live webinars or promoting your lead magnets, or making one to one invitations for people to join your mailing list when they engage with stuff or they slide into your DMs, I would certainly put that back at the top of the list. And as I said, I would start to explore ads sooner rather than later. Ads require organic validation first or you're going to be risking money, not just time. And so if you're still not sure whether posting on social media, being on social media is even adding any value to your business, if you're not sure whether that's actually doing anything to grow your audience, to nurture relationships with your audience, to generate leads or to create any sales, I would still recommend getting to that organic validation as quickly as possible before investing in paid ads. But just know that the timeframe between getting organic validation and starting to invest in ads is getting shorter and shorter the longer this tail end of social media's life cycle goes on. And even though this might feel a bit doom and gloom, like social media might be coming to an end, or sometimes it might get to the point where it's only pay to play for advertisers, I want to reassure you that when this happens, one of the most magical things about the decline of a technology, a platform, a social media is that we end up with this splintering, but we splinter to things that are a much better fit for our needs, that actually solve the problems that we have. And I am currently working on a very juicy little project myself where I want to solve one of the problems that business owners have when it comes to social media. And that is it's getting harder and harder to strike up conversations, grow your network, meet people, actually develop relationships with your audience, but with other business owners as well, because of all of these different factors that are contributing to a decline in the usability and the connection between what we want from social media and what we get from social media. So I actually have a video that I've shared on both Facebook and Instagram. I'll put the link in the show notes of today's episode where I would love to get your answer to two questions. So if you go and watch that little video, it's 90 seconds, it's a reel. Please do make sure that you go and find on your preferred platform Facebook or Instagram and answer. I've got two questions there. And that is actually going to help me to not only build something that is going to solve this issue and actually be really user oriented and really helpful, but also it's going to feed a lot of my content moving forward to help you to maximize the results you get from social media, the results that you get from the technology and platforms that you are using as a business owner. So there's just two questions on those videos. Please make sure you go and find them. The show notes of today's episode are@tashcorbyn.com 528 and that will be where I'll have the link to the Facebook post and the Instagram post if you follow me over there. It's going to be something that's fairly recent if you're watching. If you're listening to this podcast when it first comes out, which most of you do, most people listen to it within the first 14 days. So please go and find that video and comment. And as I said, you'll find the link in the show notes of today's episode as well. Thank you so much for joining me for this app. Until next time, I cannot wait to see you shine and I really do look forward to your input and your insights on what's bugging you with social media and what you see. Still love about it and I cannot wait to share with you this new special project that I've been working on. I'll say more in the coming episodes. Bye for now.