​Create posts for yourself and your followers. Don't create posts for the platform. 

Unfortunately a lot of people do the latter. They post with the goal of pleasing whatever algorithm runs the social media site they are on. And when the algorithm changes, they change their content to please the new algorithm. 

I have seen content that makes a site's algorithm ridiculously happy, but that does nothing for the person posting it or the person reading it.

​Social media stats really don't tell you much.

With social media you can theoretically see how many people saw your post. (I say "theoretically" because you don't know if they are giving you accurate numbers or not.) There is even the eye candy of the total number of likes and shares.  

And while it is somewhat better data than you get from, say, a magazine ad, it is still just eye candy. There are so many people out there who, when they see content that they like, don't do anything. They don't click like, they don't comment, and they don't share. Why? Because they don't have to. They grew up in a world where, after you read an article you liked, you put the magazine down and that was the end of it. Maybe you mentioned it to a friend, but you did not document this communication in any way. 

No matter what the platform is, the total number of likes you get for a post is not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read it and liked it. And it is definitely not an accurate measurement of the number of people who read your post and thought about it.

Social media, blogs, and such are incredibly powerful and valuable ways of communicating with your audience, fans, or customers. However, there is no good way to measure any of it yet. 

Occasionally I will look through online articles and blog posts about social media marketing. They usually have titles like "10 Ways To Get Amazing Facebook Numbers!". It is a style stolen from vanity magazines that have headlines like "5 Tips For Driving Women Wild!", which sounds like it was written by someone who has restraining orders against him.

I find a good test for these articles is to compare them with someone's social media you admire. For instance, I think the gold standard for social media is Humans Of New York (HONY). When I compare HONY with what these articles suggest, they never match up. 

The articles say "have calls to action", "ask lots of questions", "do live video regularly." HONY does none of this and their engagement is far above the pages I see using these tactics. HONY posts quality content consistently. It is straight forward, but it's not easy.

​If your goal in creating social media content is to beat the site's algorithm, you are going to crank out a large quantity of crap. 

​"I will say to customers, 'We can do fabulous designs for you. But the next guy will say that as well. But one thing I will give you a guarantee on is that our project management and cost control is second to none. And I've got people who will tell you that, references who will tell you that.' And in an industry that is notorious for delivering late and over-budget, that's got to be worth something. We don't deliver late. We don't deliver over-budget." - Ken Moore, Anfield Inc.