Aubrium Blog
Does paying for verification actually boost your reach?
The platforms made big claims about what a checkmark does for you. We read what they actually published, found the one randomized test that ran, and isolated what nobody can verify.
Trending audio on Instagram: the most repeated myth in the creator economy
Every creator is told to chase trending sounds. The Reels system card lists audio signals, but they measure whether you engage with audio, not whether the audio itself is popular.
Who engages matters more than how many
A study of 54 million invitations found that five signals from five separate corners of your life beat five from one clique. The catch: it measured website sign-ups, not Instagram reach.
A 61-million-person experiment on whether social proof changes behavior
One experiment on 61 million people found that seeing which specific friends had already acted made people act too. A counter on its own did nothing. The hardest evidence we have that real social proof moves behavior.
Do schedulers kill your reach? The post-from-a-real-phone myth, tested
The belief that Instagram punishes scheduled posts is everywhere. Meta runs an official API for exactly that purpose. What the documents actually say, and what nobody can source.
Post every day is a myth: what Instagram actually says about frequency
Instagram coaches say post 3x daily or die. The system cards list no frequency signal. Mosseri said quality beats quantity. The gap is worth closing.
Nobody can predict which post takes off
Two studies tested how predictable a viral post is. Early signals help a little, then the future goes dark. This is the rigorous answer to why one post blew up and the identical one did not.
The experiment that proved hits are partly random
Quality set a floor and a ceiling. Everything in between was luck. Three published experiments on why experts cannot pick the winner, and what that leaves you.
Every platform quietly switched from "who you follow" to "what you like"
TikTok, YouTube and Instagram all moved to interest-based feeds. Each platform said so in writing. It is the biggest structural change in social media in a decade.
