We recently argued that following-only feeds make it harder for emerging causes to be discovered by people who don’t follow them yet. But discovery is not only shrinking where feeds change. It also shrinks inside the tools campaigns pay for. 

Let's make this practical. Dirk wrote about it in politik&kommunikation on the example of framing the same issue for a political campaign in four different ways. While one version performed roughly 100% better than the weaker ones, others did about 75% better. The strongest frames were built around themes where a reaction was likely anyway, in our case corruption and national pride. The results told us how well each message performed, but not who it performed with, so they couldn’t tell us whether the campaign was growing its audience or only making the existing one louder. We took this question to our panel at the Political Communication Summit in Vienna and the answers were telling: unless campaigns work with separate target groups, comparable message tests and their own growth criteria, mobilisation and growth look identical in the overall results.

Platforms Choose Who Sees Our Messages

Platforms are built to find the people most likely to react. Given a goal, a click, a like or a sign-up, they show the message to the people most likely to deliver it, who are rarely strangers, often  followers, past engagers and people who resemble them. Engagement rises. Cost per result drops. It looks like progress, but the campaign is only getting better at talking to its own base. Message tests work the same way: the winning frame may simply be the one the base likes most. A 100% improvement can be a louder echo, not a stronger argument.

Is Base the problem then?

None of this makes the base the problem. As Gabriella Zutrau, senior advisor for digital strategy on Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign put it: “Preach to the choir, because they will sing to the congregation.” Supporters are often the most credible route to people a campaign cannot reach directly, just as, in our last post, a large follower base worked as a distribution channel for big organisations. The mistake is treating the base as the destination, not as a medium or a channel, and never checking whether the message travels further.

Why This Matters Beyond Individual Campaigns

No organisation can grow by talking only to its own supporters. As Nick Bridge, founder of CRIIICKET put it from a commercial perspective: “If you keep aiming for the same customers, you run out of customers.” Elections, policy debates and social causes are rarely decided by people who already agree. They are decided by a movable middle: people who are not yet convinced but can still be reached. A campaign that only hears from its own circle cannot know what concerns people outside it, and has no chance of answering them. Only by reaching beyond that circle can organisations take other people’s concerns seriously, and then give them a reason to listen.

What Organisations Can Do Now

“Posting more”  is not a strategy when discovery gets harder. Neither is optimising harder for the same people. 

Bringing the Same Messages to Different Audiences

A message test is only useful if it tells us who each version reached. Start by defining the audiences before launch: the existing base (followers, past engagers and people who resemble them) and one or two groups outside it that the campaign actually needs, such as younger voters. Then run every framing separately within each audience, with the same budget, timeframe and goal, and exclude existing followers and engagers from the outside groups so they don’t quietly take over the results. Compare frames within each audience, not in one overall total. A frame that wins with supporters but falls flat outside the echo chamber will show up as exactly that, and a frame that holds up across audiences is the one that actually moves people. Who carries the message matters too: partners, creators and voices already trusted in those communities can reach people the campaign’s own account cannot.

Looking Beyond Likes and Shares

Likes and shares measure applause, and most of it comes from people who already agree. Better signals measure attention and movement. Gabriella Zutrau suggested watch time and hook retention: holding half your viewers past three seconds is good, and holding them to six means the content is actually working. Follow rate is another signal: views and shares show how far a post went, but follows show whether new people decided to stay. Decide these growth criteria before the campaign starts, so success is not defined afterwards by whatever number looks best.

Accepting That Reaching People May Cost More

People outside the base are less likely to react, so each result costs more. That is not a failure; it is the price of reaching people the campaign does not have yet. If base and growth audiences share one budget, the platform will tend to move spend to whichever delivers the cheapest results, usually the base. So give growth its own budget line and judge it by its own measure, such as cost per new person reached or retained, not cost per click. And give it time: results with new audiences often show up more slowly than mobilisation results.

None of this solves the problem. Platforms will keep optimising for reaction. But testing across audiences, measuring growth instead of engagement and budgeting for growth is a starting point. At least then a campaign knows whether it is growing, or just getting louder. The useful question after a campaign is not only how well it performed, but who it became better at reaching.