>There is an existential tradeoff between growth and data control. In a world where virality coefficient and new user acquisition forms the lifeblood of any social network, growth through public content has been the fastest way to grow. Making content indexable by search engines, shareable across platforms, and embeddable anywhere creates exponential growth opportunities through compounding distribution effects. ### Always remember that a social network can improve growth through **five big levers** ##### 1. Content Discovery This is by far the most important thing to social network growth. Ask anyone working on scaled consumer products for a living and they would agree that access to search engine traffic, viral loops and platform integrations is the largest moving lever for growth metrics. This is arguably the most crucial factor as indexable, linkable content has consistently shown to have the largest impact on user acquisition. The saying "content wants to be free" is particularly relevant in social networks. Even with optimal feature set and engagement hooks, restricted content access will severely limit platform growth. > What does it mean for your social network? The day you decide to go down the path of growth, the most important thing would be the access to distribution channels that allow you to maximize new user acquisition, engagement loops, viral sharing etc. This means having a strong SEO strategy from day one is crucial. This allows you to do both immediate growth through search traffic and long-tail acquisition through accumulated backlinks and domain authority. ##### 2. Platform Distribution Future social platforms will push growth vectors to become really great at the three major constraints: 1. Discoverability 2. Virality 3. Retention While feature completeness is important, it's becoming increasingly commoditized across the industry. The key differentiator isn't the feature set itself but how widely your content can spread. > What does it mean for your social network? An open approach ensures that when you eventually do use advanced growth techniques across SEO, Virality, Multi-channel Distribution, A/B Testing etc, you will be uniquely positioned to perform better on horizontally scaled growth than any walled garden. It also allows unique optimizations across acquisition channels and internal growth benchmarks for SEO, Content Distribution, Platform Integrations and other value offerings. ##### 3. Content Scale Content volume during early growth is very important. Platform engagement improves significantly as more content provides broader coverage of user interests. It's one of the levers you can optimize for by ensuring that content creation has minimal friction. ##### 4. Distribution Optimization Channel optimization is an excellent way to ensure that the content reaches intended audiences effectively. When you're network scales, the distribution channels become increasingly important. Yes, this creates vulnerability to LLM training scraping, but the growth benefits generally outweigh the risks as most investors will generally value viral growth over future promise of AI. Here SEO optimization, viral loops and platform integrations become important but are generally outside the scope of this topic. Just note that the context of growth trumps any data protection advantage here, since it's usually a matter of survival vs long term value creation. ##### 5. User Experience > a **user experience** metric can be set to define any configurable part of a platform that the user interacts with. UX optimization generally translates into least meaningful gains out of all the above mentioned levers. Consider it being able to unlock a few basis points worth of improvement and worth doing once you have settled on a growth strategy that is performant. --- Having an open growth approach really helps maximize network effects while being deeply horizontally integrated across platforms. It also means that users unlock greater distribution while search engines and external platforms gives you better channels around what users want from your platform. In the end, all companies will need to have a definitive plan on growth, social companies have the highest potential for virality and having an open approach is a great way to scale user acquisition while being deeply distributed such that others can't replicate your network effects.