A low-stakes birthday message.

Caring about the reach of a social media post is eating shit.

A few years ago, I worked a side job at a music lessons studio. I sat at the front desk, managing people’s bookings and answering questions.

I was also in charge of the brand’s very sparse, bare-bones social media presence. On staff with me were Mike, a fellow front desk laborer, and Ingrid, the unofficial marketing and PR person.

On Mike’s birthday, I took to the studio’s Facebook to wish him a public happy birthday in a text post. It was just for fun, and ultimately very low stakes: there were just a few hundred followers at the time and no one in charge had ever cared about the content of these accounts. The overall tone of the studio’s social media was light and conversational, so this simple, silly happy birthday greeting fit the brand identity perfectly. There was nothing controversial about it.

The next day, I went back to Facebook, curious about how well the post had performed. I also wanted to know if Mike had seen it.

Only. . . my message was gone, and its place was a new, completely unrelated happy birthday post that I had not written. I looked at the studio’s analytics and discovered that Ingrid, who rarely partook in any day-to-day social media tasks, was the author of the new greeting.

Now, there was nothing wrong with her birthday post; it was similar to mine but a little more sweet and friendly, matching her personality. Alongside it was a photo of Mike at a drum set.

At first, I wasn’t upset, just confused. Did my own birthday greeting not save? Was it flagged and taken down for some reason? Did I accidentally tag the wrong Mike? I couldn’t figure out what was so different about our two versions that would warrant taking the time to log in, delete mine, and craft a new one.

The next time I saw Ingrid, we somehow got to talking about it, and she cheerfully remarked that she loved my idea to wish Mike happy birthday. But, she said, she replaced mine because “posts with photos do better.”

Hmm. Posts with photos do better.

Well, fine, I thought. That made sense.

But then I thought about it some more. Sure, posts with photos might “do better,” as in, they may garner more interaction with the page’s followers — but why the hell did it matter? I mean, who cared? This was a one-time happy birthday wish on a small business Facebook page followed by fewer than a thousand people. What level of performance were we really aspiring to? Nothing we ever published garnered more than ten interactions, ever. In fact, the studio’s social media was typically silent unless I was the one running it that shift.

The final time I saw my original happy birthday post before it was deleted, there were maybe four interactions on it: three likes and one comment. At the time I saw Ingrid’s, there were at most ten interactions. . . probably, I don’t know, seven likes and three comments.

Now, this may seem like a big jump, but to what ultimate goal? The only people who would see the studio’s social media were people that already followed it and were most likely already customers. I may not have a degree in consumer behavior, but I am willing to bet the studio’s clientele weren’t swayed into purchasing additional drum lessons and/or band rehearsal space just because the studio wished one of their employees happy birthday.

Even if you’re thinking strictly mathematically, considering all work done on the clock as an expense and every pair of eyeballs on a post as potential business, this was still a pointless move. Ingrid took paid time and effort to delete my post when she could’ve kept it up while contributing a post about something else entirely. She could’ve modified mine without deleting it so that the original interactions were maintained. Or, better yet, she could’ve posted a birthday message on a different platform, like Twitter, in order to reach a completely different group of followers for twice the impact.

By deleting my happy birthday message but immediately following it up with another post communicating the same thing, Ingrid took the risk of alienating some of the studio’s eagle-eyed followers; she may have inadvertently led them to believe that our studio was just spamming messages willy-nilly with no curation process at all. I’m not well-versed in risk assessment, but I wonder if this action would risk losing followers at a rate greater than increasing interaction from the happy birthday post itself.

What’s more, the pain and suffering I went through is immeasurable. My ego was bruised irrevocably and my future social media posts from then on out were affected. I could no longer be as confident in my abilities.

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By the way, all of this took place more than six years ago. ✍︎