The Majority Illusion on Social Media: Is Everyone Really Talking About Your Brand?

Your new product has just gone on sale. A few days later, you start seeing social media comments about delivery delays. The same complaint keeps showing up, one after another, and someone on the team says, "Everyone is complaining about us." But how many customers actually ran into this problem? Do the posts you're seeing come from different customers, or is the same comment being shared over and over?

This distinction determines the step you take next. Resolving one customer's late order is a different job from fixing a delivery problem that is happening across several cities. To tell them apart, you need to look not only at the number of posts but also at the experiences behind them.

BraindPower, a social media analysis and social listening platform, tracks conversations about your brand across different digital sources and helps you evaluate them together. That way, instead of the impression created by a single post, you can take comments from different channels into account.

A hundred posts don't always mean a hundred customers

Imagine ten people each writing about the same problem ten times. On your screen, you see a hundred posts. In another scenario, a hundred different customers each write once. The total is the same, but in the second case far more people are saying they experienced the problem. That's why the total number of posts should be read together with the number of accounts behind them.

A study published by Pew Research Center in 2021 helps us understand this difference. In the study, 1,026 adult Twitter users in the US shared their account information with researchers. The posts of the 917 accounts that were publicly accessible were examined in detail between June 12 and September 12, 2021.

According to the findings, the most active quarter of users produced 97% of the posts in the period studied. The remaining three quarters accounted for just 3%. That figure also included retweets and replies to other people's posts. In other words, not every post was a new opinion from a different person.

This ratio doesn't represent Turkey today, nor the customers of any particular brand. But it points to something brands should think about: a small, very active group can produce most of the content we come across. So seeing hundreds of posts isn't enough to say that hundreds of different people share the same view.

Why does the same opinion show up everywhere?

Besides how often people post, whom we follow can also shape the picture we see. In their 2016 "majority illusion" study published in PLOS ONE, Kristina Lerman and colleagues examined the connection structures of social networks. They showed that in certain network structures, a behavior that is rare across the whole group can appear common in the immediate surroundings of many individuals.

Let's think of an example from brand communication. A few of the accounts you follow criticize the same product, and their posts circulate in your feed. You may conclude that those who dislike the product are the majority. Yet the comments you see may be limited to the accounts you follow and their immediate circle.

The lesson for brand communication is to look at other sources before treating a view we often encounter in our own circle as everyone's view. A view appearing frequently in front of us is not the same as it being shared by a broad audience.

Are harsh comments enough to tell how big the reaction is?

How harshly a comment is written can also affect our judgment. In a 2023 study by William J. Brady and colleagues, published in Nature Human Behaviour, participants evaluated Twitter posts about political debates in the US. Readers perceived the posters' anger as higher than the posters themselves reported.

This study doesn't look at customer complaints. But for brand communication it raises a question: when we see a harsh comment, might we also be overestimating the size of the problem?

To find out, you need to check which event the comment is based on and whether other customers have had the same experience. That said, a serious problem reported by only a few people still needs to be resolved. How widespread a problem is and how serious it is should be assessed separately.

Understand conversations about your brand better with BraindPower

When comments about your brand are spread across different channels, it becomes hard to track where the same problem is being raised. BraindPower's social media analysis and agenda tracking features let you examine conversations on channels such as X, Ekşi Sözlük, news sources and YouTube from a single platform. So instead of deciding based on the impression of a single post, you can also look at what's being said elsewhere.

Take the delivery complaints example. After a comment you see on X, you can check whether other users also mention the delay. Is the topic coming up in YouTube comments too? Are similar experiences being described on Ekşi Sözlük? Examining different sources together helps your team decide which complaints to investigate.

BraindPower's sentiment analysis classifies content as positive, negative or neutral. By following how this distribution changes over time, you can see the periods when negative comments increase.

You can then read the relevant content and work out why people are reacting. For example, customers may be reacting to the delivery delay itself, to not being kept informed, or to being unable to reach the support team. Each of these calls for a different solution.

After fixing the problem and explaining it to your customers, you can keep following the conversations. Are new complaints still coming in? Are the same questions still being asked? This follow-up helps you see where your explanation needs additional information.

When you evaluate the insights from BraindPower together with your customer service and operations records, you can better understand the reasons behind the reaction you see on social media. Your team can then discuss what needs to be done for which problem, instead of a blanket judgment like "Everyone is complaining about us."

What matters is not only seeing how much your brand is being talked about, but understanding who is talking, through which experiences, and why. Evaluating conversations across different channels together with BraindPower can be your starting point as you look for answers to these questions.