In 2024, Web is a seemingly endless space where information vanish on itself and our presence seems to become a grain of sand in a huge beach every year.
Finding channels of visibility seems to be a relentless challenge, when every now and then we discover that new pools of visibility have emerged in which we are punctually absent, and we periodically feel cut off from a ‘new advancing’ that – effectively – progresses inexorably by creating new points of sense generation and catalyzing public attention.
The galaxy of social media
At the dawn of the Social Era, it seemed possible to support what appeared to be the new channels independent of the overwhelming power of Google, when Facebook and Twitter were taking their first steps in the magnum sea of a network that at that time was focused on Web Search for textual content published on independent sites.
It was, however, the opening of a digital era dominated by user generated content, which spread like wildfire creating gigantic reservoirs, soon destined to become symbols of a new network: web 2.0.
Little did we know that social would follow one another, generating a series of separate spaces that have been able to capture the attention of every segment of digital consumers, both from a demographic and content perspective.
Social for photos, social for videos, social for finding or offering jobs, social for dating, for buying and selling items, clothes, marketplaces for professions and recruitment.
What we have today is a polycentric web in which any content finds a partial space for an audience that is now fragmented across different platforms, and engaged by all kinds of content.
Dispersion and the prevalence of chaos
Information and content thus risks potential dispersion, regardless of the channel in which we decide to publish it.
If we put a new web page online it will never be read by social users accustomed to the visual channels of Instagram or TikTok, or by consumers of YouTube videos.
If we produce a social post, on Facebook and Instagram, our site will remain without the lifeblood represented by constant updating.
If we plan to start a videopodcast channel, again, we will meet a new audience by having to make not inconsiderable efforts not to lose that public visibility that we had already cultivated on the previous channels, cultivating the site, social profiles, the more or less classic networks known by everyone.
The polycentric web is a challenge that seems onerous, and not only for the rockiest companies but even for the most organized creators, who can rarely curate an entire network from A to Z without sacrificing something.
Visibility is an asset that is gained in fragments and dispersed in trickles.
Organizing the editorial flow
A first escape route to this problem comes from strategically organizing content flow. Older social media marketers know that when it comes to distributing good content, it is worthwhile to provide a cross-platform dissemination path.
Depending on the content we can then reach different audience groups, mitigating dispersion and offering polycentrism a widespread but planned, I would say optimized, distribution.
Today, a video can be published on a vast majority of platforms; and it would not be wrong to think that it can be published in the first place on the dear old corporate website, which indeed can offer a valuable showcase for such content.
Better still is to be able to conceive the content, from its genesis, as a multichannel vehicle that can be published in different formats, text, video, audio, and thus know how to make it transversal to the contexts of fruition and expendable on the different listening centers, multiplying its public repercussions.
A challenge, this, that sees in the content creator no longer a mere creative actor who adapts to the single platform, but on the contrary a true editor at the service of the information that one wants to convey, making it spin and survive in the polycentrism of today’s Net.