Reading what’s not on the page

David Ogilvy said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say’.

The truth in his statement is playing out today. Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are shifting from being a mirror of your social graph (𝘸𝘩𝘰 you’re interested in) to that of your interest graph (𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 you’re interested in). TikTok has always done this.

Instagram users are up in arms. No random videos, stop copying TikTok. The Kardashians are miffed.

Remember the backlash against Facebook when it launched its News Feed back in 2006?

‘Facebook did not give the users what they claimed to want, which was abolishing the News Feed completely. That’s because the company correctly 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right’ — present-day analysis by Stratechery.

Go back to the quote this post opens with. The crux of the difference between what people say and what they do is right there. Users are saying they want their familiar feed but they’re a fickle lot. Give them something that wows them and they’ll change their opinion and forget about it. That’s why despite the big scene Instagram isn’t going back to Instagram.

Founders, marketers, and product leaders are not led to their biggest shifts by a beeping tracker. It is often on the back of a non-obvious insight. And that makes sense. Were the insight obvious to all, the advantage of foresight vanishes.

To be clear, the insight for Instagram and Facebook may not be entirely hidden. There’s TikTok and Youtube–both platforms that do not care who your friends are but keep you happy by feeding you what you like.

If you’ve ever launched a product or a service based solely on customer input only to find few takers for it, you would know that following customer advice does not ensure safety. Steve Jobs said, ‘Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do’.

Today, users may complain that it cannot be called social media if the messenger is not important (𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 content you see). True. But who cares? They won’t care tomorrow if they’re happy watching cat videos posted by a stranger and recommended by an algorithm or maybe even generated by AI.

In the shift that we’re seeing on social media, there’s a familiar lesson: Follow actions, not words, because people don’t know what they want.