The Psychology of Audience Capture on Social Media
You spend hours crafting a thoughtful post about something you genuinely care about. You hit publish, check back eagerly, and... crickets. But that off the cuff one-liner that popped into your head on the commute home? It's blowing up. The likes pour in, the comments multiply, and suddenly you're wondering: should I be posting more content like this?
This is a familiar scenario for many online creators, the beginning of what personal branding expert Goldie Chan calls "the quickest way to insanity online." In her new book, Personal Branding for Introverts, Chan is wary of this audience capture dynamic on social media: caring too much about the number of likes can fundamentally reshape not just what you create, but who you become. Understanding the psychological patterns at play can allow you to navigate the social media landscape with more balance and equanimity.
Your Brain on Social Media Metrics
When you pull a slot machine lever, you don't know if you'll win or lose. Your brain releases more dopamine in anticipation of an uncertain reward than it does for a guaranteed one. This is why checking your phone for notifications feels so compulsive. You're not just seeking the reward itself, you're hooked on the anticipation. This is the potency of variable reward schedules, and they’re a massive driver of behavior, both on social media, and on the slot machines in Las Vegas.
Content creation also creates its own moments of anticipation, and a similar mode of variable, unexpected reward. Every time you post something online, you're essentially pulling that lever. Will this post get 10 likes? 100? 1,000? The unpredictability creates what psychologists call a "prediction error" in your brain's reward system. When engagement exceeds your expectations, your brain floods with dopamine. When it underperforms, you feel deflated. Either way, you're compelled to post again to resolve the uncertainty and drive new moments of anticipation.
This is why Chan describes metrics as "a Venus flytrap that, literally, you walk next to and it claps close and you're stuck inside." You don't suddenly fall into an obsession with numbers. Instead, you gradually walk toward it, post by post. Before long, you can be trapped.
The real danger lies in what psychologists call the “over-justification effect”, when the extrinsic rewards (e.g. social media engagement metrics) outweigh the intrinsic ones (e.g. what you had originally wanted to express). Initially, you may create content because it's meaningful to you, because you have something to say. But as the metrics become more salient, your motivation shifts. You start creating for the numbers. Once that shift happens, you've fundamentally changed your relationship with your work.
The Slow Drift of Audience Capture
The psychological literature on behavioral reinforcement helps explain why this process is so insidious. When certain behaviors (posting specific types of content) consistently produce rewards (likes, shares, comments), those behaviors get strengthened. The tricky part though, is that you often don't notice it happening.
Audience capture is a slow and subtle phenomenon. Consider the economics concept of Keynes' beauty contest. In this thought experiment, you're asked to predict which faces will be voted most beautiful in a contest. The optimal strategy isn't to pick the faces you find most beautiful. It's to pick the faces you think others will find beautiful. Or more accurately, the faces you think others think others will find beautiful.
This same dynamic plays out every time you create content. You're not just expressing yourself, you're implicitly modeling what your audience wants to see. And because this process of building models of other minds (what psychologists call social cognition) happens automatically and unconsciously, you drift toward audience preferences without realizing it.
Chan has witnessed this firsthand. She notes that when creators focus on numbers, it often comes "to the detriment of the quality of the content that they put out." The content slowly morphs, becoming less about what the creator genuinely wants to express and more about what generates engagement. Your "brand core" begins to erode, replaced by an algorithmically optimized version of yourself.
This is what makes audience capture so psychologically powerful. It's not a dramatic transformation. It's a series of tiny, rational adjustments that compound over time until you look back and barely recognize what you've become.
The Quality Paradox in Content Creation
How then, should one think about their online presence? Substance wins in the long run, even when metrics suggest otherwise.
Chan uses a vivid analogy to explain this. "If you make an absolute terrible burger, it goes viral," she says. "Very few people will come back to have that burger unless it's an ironic thing." But create a genuinely delicious burger? People return. They tell their friends. They become regulars.
The same principle applies to content creation. Viral moments driven by novelty or controversy rarely translate into sustained attention. But when you consistently create work with real substance, what Chan calls having "meat in your meal," you build something more valuable than a spike in engagement: you build a reputation.
Research on expertise and mastery supports this. Depth of processing, the kind of thoughtful engagement that comes from focusing on quality over metrics, creates more durable learning and stronger audience connections. People may not always engage immediately with substantive content, but it's the content they remember, return to, and recommend.
Chan learned this through her own experience creating over 800 consecutive daily videos on LinkedIn. Her first videos didn't explode. She remembers getting 10 likes on an early video and feeling genuinely thrilled: "These were 10 people that I didn't know, that had found my video, that had liked my video." That enthusiasm and curiosity, she argues, is what creators need to maintain, especially in the early days.
"Focusing too early on about the numbers, and not giving your... whatever you're making, time to breathe, and your personal brand time to breathe," Chan explains, "that is what it needs to grow."
The Path Forward
The metrics aren't going away, and neither is our brain's susceptibility to variable rewards. But by understanding these psychological mechanisms, we can make more conscious choices about what we create and why.
As Chan wisely notes, "the way to madness is to care about metrics that don't matter." The challenge is recognizing which metrics actually matter for your goals. If you're building a personal brand based on genuine expertise and authentic connection, then vanity metrics like likes are nearly meaningless. What matters is whether you're creating work that reflects your values, showcases your real thinking, and attracts the kind of attention that serves your long-term goals.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
