Feeds Now Decide What People Watch

Most people who see your next video won’t follow you. That is not a guess about the future. It is how the big feeds already work, and Meta has said so on its own earnings calls.

For a small business, this changes the question. It’s no longer “how do I get more followers?” It’s “how many chances does each of my videos get to be shown to strangers?”

What Meta said about recommended content

On Meta’s first-quarter 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that more than 20% of the content in Facebook and Instagram feeds was recommended by AI from accounts people don’t follow. For Instagram as a whole, he put it at about 40% of what people see (report of the Q1 2023 call).

On the same call he said that AI recommendations had driven more than a 24% increase in time spent on Instagram since Reels launched. A year earlier, on the Q2 2022 call, he had said the recommended share of the Facebook feed was about 15% and was expected to keep growing (Fortune).

Your follower count decides who can see your video. The feed decides who actually does.

TikTok was built this way from the start: its “For You” feed is a recommendation feed, not a list of the accounts you follow. YouTube Shorts works the same way.

What a recommendation feed means for a small business

A recommendation feed tests a new video on a small group of viewers. If they watch it, the feed shows it to more people. If they scroll away, it stops. Followers help, but they are not the gate.

That has three practical effects:

• A small account can reach strangers, because the feed does not need a big following to test a video.
• Each post is one test. A video that fails its first test rarely gets a second chance on the same account.
• The number of tests you run matters as much as the quality of any single video.

Say a bakery has 30 good short videos and one Instagram account. Each video gets one test in the feed. Some do well, most don’t, and the bakery has no way to tell bad luck from a bad video.

Why one account caps you

Posting the same video twice on the same account looks like a duplicate. So with one account, every video gets one try. That is the real limit, not your follower count.

This is the idea behind how x20.online works. We create and run 20 or more TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook accounts for a business and post its existing videos on them every day. Each copy is edited so it is not a duplicate. One video then gets 20 or more tests instead of one.

What this does not solve

More tests don’t fix a weak video. If people scroll past it on one account, they will usually scroll past it on twenty. More accounts also take weeks to prepare before they post. And results vary by niche, country and month.

So the order stays the same: make videos people want to watch, then give each of them more chances. You can see how this plays out on the accounts we run in our live statistics, and read more on our blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I still need followers on Instagram and TikTok?

Followers still help, but they are not the gate. Recommendation feeds show videos to people who don’t follow you. A large share of what people see comes from accounts they don’t follow, so a small account can still reach new viewers with a video that holds attention.

Where does the 40% Instagram figure come from?

Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s first-quarter 2023 earnings call that about 40% of the content people see across Instagram is recommended by AI from accounts they don’t follow. Meta has not published one fixed share since, so treat the number as a dated reference.

Can I just repost the same video on my own account?

Not really. Reposting the same video on the same account looks like a duplicate and usually performs worse. To give one video more chances, it has to be posted as a unique copy on different accounts, which is what we do on the accounts we run.

If giving every video 20 chances by hand sounds like a full-time job, that’s what x20.online does. You keep making videos; we post them and send you the stats. See our pricing.