Filter Bubbles on social media: a guide for brands to join the right ones

Do you feel comfortable in your feed? Of course you do. It was designed to make you feel that way. You only see things you like, news that confirms your worldview, and, above all, products you might have thought about buying once, three months ago, at 3 a.m.

This tailor-made paradise, this “information ecosystem” where reality is filtered so as never to upset you, has a name: Filter Bubble. For years, sociologists and digital philosophers, such as Eli Pariser, who coined the term back in 2011, have been warning us about it. And we listened in a corner and thought one thing: “Wow. A perfectly segmented audience, self-assured and impervious to conflicting messages. Where do we sign up?”

This is not an article about how to burst the bubble—we’ll leave that problem to the philosophers—but an article about how to enter it. How does a brand become the favorite decor of that gilded cage? How do you infiltrate the right bubble to sell to the right people?

What is the Filter Bubble on social media

The Filter Bubble is not a conspiracy. Platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok don’t want to show you “the world,” but “your world.”

Why? Because the more you like what you see, the longer you stay online. The longer you stay online, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the more you buy. The algorithm, therefore, acts as an incredibly efficient digital bouncer to decide what to show you; it studies you.

The algorithm analyzes:

• Your likes: what do you like?
• Your clicks: what do you linger on?
• Your dwell time: did you watch that kitten video for 3 seconds or 3 minutes? (Recorded data).
• Your searches: Google knows what you want before you do.
• Your geolocation: where are you now?
• Your friends/followers: tell me who you chat with and I’ll tell you who you are (and what you’ll buy).
• The device you use: iPhone or Android? It says a lot about you.

The result? A unique information universe for each user. If you and your neighbor search for “best restaurant,” you will see different results. If you open Instagram, you’ll see different worlds. Your neighbor is in their bubble (vegan, progressive, CrossFit lover), you’re in yours (omnivore, tech enthusiast, meme lover).

For society, this is a problem (polarization, echo chambers, zero confrontation). For a brand, this is an opportunity.

How does a brand get into the right bubbles?

The algorithm has created “hunting grounds” full of pre-qualified consumers for us. They are there, grouped by interests, just waiting for confirmation.

Your goal is not to reach them. It is to become part of their world.

Here is the action plan in 5 (more or less) simple steps:

Become the anthropologist of the bubble (extreme profiling)

You can’t enter a bubble if you don’t know what it’s like. Generic targeting (“Women, 25-45, interested in fashion”) is dead. Today, you have to be specific to an almost disturbing degree and prefer “People who follow @NicheBrand, use the hashtag #CottageCore, only buy sustainable fabrics, and spend their time saving gardening Pins” instead of people “interested in fashion.”

You have to study the bubble you want to penetrate.

• Language: What slang do they use? What emojis? Do they use “love” or “sucks”?
• Values: What do they hate? What do they love? Are they obsessed with sustainability or unbridled luxury?
• Aesthetics: What filters do they use? Saturated or desaturated colors? Clean text or gothic fonts?
• Leaders: who are the influencers in that bubble? Not Chiara Ferragni, but micro-influencers with 5,000 followers who, within that bubble, are considered gods.

Active camouflage

Now that you know how they talk and think, you need to create content that looks like it was generated by the bubble itself. Your brand shouldn’t seem like an intruder, but one of them.

If the bubble hates blatant advertising, yours shouldn’t be blatant advertising, but a useful tutorial, a funny meme, a shareable thought.

• Fitness bubble goal: Don’t post a photo of your supplement with “BUY NOW” written on it. Post a 15-second video tutorial on “3 Ab Exercises You Hate” and casually place the product in the background.
• Personal finance bubble goal: Don’t sell your course. Write a thread on “The 5 investment mistakes I made in my 20s” and link to the course only at the end, as a resource.

The algorithm will see users in the bubble interacting with your content (likes, comments, saves) and think, “Ah, this content belongs to this bubble.” And just like that, you’re in.

Pay the toll (Targeted advertising)

Organic content is great, but it’s slow, and we’re in a hurry to sell. That’s where ads (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google Ads) come in.

Advertising tools are the main gateway to the bubble; they’re made for this purpose. Don’t waste your budget, and if you really don’t know where to start, start with your competitors’ ads. In general:

• Don’t target “Interests: Cycling.”
• Upload a list of your existing customers (Custom Audience) and ask Facebook to find people who are identical to them (Lookalike Audience).
• Target people who have interacted with micro-influencers (Step 1) in the last 30 days.

You are literally paying the algorithm to put you in the feed of people it has already kindly grouped for you.

Seduce the algorithm

The algorithm is vain, it loves content that makes people react, and its favorite metric is not “likes,” but:

1. Sharing: the user is acting as a missionary for your content. The algorithm loves you.
2. Saving: the user thinks your content is so valuable that they want to review it. The algorithm idolizes you.
3. Commenting: especially long comments that start debates. The algorithm goes into ecstasy.
4. Watch time: Did you get someone to watch a Reel until the end (perhaps with a clever loop)? The algorithm will propose marriage to you.

Your content must extort these reactions. Ask questions, create shareable memes, tutorials to save, and use controversy (with caution) to spark debates. The more positive signals you give to the algorithm-master, the more it will show your content within the bubble, strengthening your presence.

Fake Authenticity

Within the bubble, people trust each other because they feel like they are “among peers,” and your brand must be perceived as an equal, not as a pot seller.

You must master the art of constructed authenticity. Show the “behind the scenes,” use a “human” tone of voice (written by a team of copywriters), respond to comments (as per the crisis management manual).

You must be relatable. You must seem like a friend who, coincidentally, also has a fantastic product to sell.

Your bubble, your personalized feed

Once upon a time, it was only TikTok that locked you in its bubble. All you had to do was watch a video of a puppy to find yourself in a universe made up of nothing but furry faces, or spend a few seconds on a cooking video to turn every scroll into a virtual buffet.

Today, however, all social networks follow the same logic. Even Instagram, which with its latest update, could be even more extreme.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has announced that it will soon be possible to have an increasingly personalized feed, tailored to our tastes and interests. Users will be able to choose between two modes:

• Followed, which shows only posts from accounts you already follow, in chronological order.
• Favorites, a separate feed with manually selected friends, creators, or brands.

In practice, Instagram offers you the opportunity to build your own bubble and stay comfortably inside it. You decide how much to narrow your world.

The soap industries are already on alert for bubble inflation, but brands are not: they dream of getting in and, above all, never getting out.

When the bubble bursts

It seems easy, right? But infiltrating bubbles has its dark sides, even for marketing.

1. 1. The wrong bubble: You get your profiling wrong (Step 1) and end up in the wrong bubble. Your ads for Argentine beef end up in the vegan bubble. Not only do you not sell, but you attract a wave of hate that the algorithm will interpret as “negative engagement,” penalizing you.
   2. The bubble trap: You’ve become so good at talking to your bubble… that now you don’t know how to talk to anyone else. Your brand is trapped. Growth? Gone. You can only sell to those 50,000 “esoteric stamp collectors.”
   3. Instant irrelevance: Bubbles move fast. The meme you used today is “cringe” tomorrow. If you’re not constantly up to date (Step 1, again), the bubble will expel you like a foreign body.

From bubble to Black Friday

And when Black Friday arrives, bubbles become veritable echo chambers of desire. Inside each bubble are ready-made wish lists, scarcity biases triggered, and users convincing each other that “this time it’s a real bargain.”

This is where you need to be: not in the global feed, but inside the micro-bubble that experiences that offer as a sign of destiny.

Prepare different ads for each digital tribe, use messages that confirm what they already think (“you deserve this discount,” “it was about time they put it on sale,” “it couldn’t be missing from your routine”). In the collective noise of Black Friday, the winner will be the one who knows how to whisper within the right microcosm, speaking the language of those who were already ready to click “buy now.”

Each bubble is an emotional and cognitive ecosystem, with its own rules, languages, and beliefs. Brands that learn to read it do not manipulate, but understand. They do not impose, but insert themselves where the mind is already ready to say “yes.” In contemporary marketing, success no longer comes from hype, but from precision.

Those who know how to enter the right bubble at the right time don’t just sell a product: they become part of the identity of those who buy it. And in 2025, this is the most evolved form of loyalty possible.