Iteration

In the context of social media, iteration refers to the cyclical and gradual process of improving, refining, and updating content or strategies, platform features, and even audience preferences themselves to get to a better place over time. This seems awfully simple, yet it is complicated. After all, much of what we see in the digital context, and certainly much of what we see on social media, is apparently visual noise—that is, the medium appears saturated with visual content vying for the viewer's gaze, attention, engagement, and, dare I say, love.

Algorithm changes have complicated this problem even further by punishing low-engagement content more than they used to; thus, iterative social media strategy is imperative. Yet, on the face of it, seeing more and more visual stuff in the medium leads one to worry that visual content is simply not resonating very much or at all, which is frightening for the ecosystem's long-term survival. Iteration, then, teaches us how to be data-driven, not from a computational perspective but from a more humanistic one using engagement metrics as our compass.