Social Media Algorithm: Making you authentic since 2016

Social Media Algorithm.

A term bandied around a lot in the social media world but little understood. It was a defining moment in the industry, a moment that changed everything.

You see, the thing is really this:

Social media platforms, quite like Google in that sense, have all to lose and nothing to gain from “getting gamed” whether white/grey/black hat style.

They have all to gain from keeping a great user experience, to grow and monetise. That includes obviously giving them the best content, the most relevant, the least click-baity content as possible.

All to gain from promoting cool, authentic content on their feeds in terms of customer UX, and not overly-sanitised commercials. Let alone click-bait.

So they engineered a growing number of layers, filters and conditions that are applied to your content, who it is shown to in % and numbers. An algorithm that scans posts for spammy words (and reduce serving). Who suggests your content to contacts who previously engaged on that topic.

The end result: It takes an awful lot more now than just 1–2 years ago for content to travel organically.

Millennial marketing at large, inbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing have raised the bar very high in terms of content mileage.

If you’re reading this then you’re probably looking how you can go about optimizing social media. The problem is the old adage of scheduling content at the right time and place to secure the most traffic is dead. What killed it? Two words: content shock.

Content production has grown much faster than our ability to consume it. Which means… lower content mileage, content arms-race and over-saturation of social media feeds. (We addressed what Content Shock precisely is here)

This is why social media marketing algorithms were born:

a) Because they just can’t serve all the content inventory to all users anyway

b) because their core business is ensuring their members are exposed to the most valuable, quality, relevant information as possible.

Put differently it means they need to make sure their platform cannot be “gamed”.

Obviously, as for every Google update for SEO marketers, social media marketers cried blue murder. Death bells rang. Drama ensued. The end fell upon us.

The truth is far more optimistic, however. Instead of sounding a death knell it was instead the beginning of a new chapter. One which, if you want to have any hope of growing organically you’ll follow.

What this is then is not a simple guide of how to “beat” or “trick” the algorithm, but instead simply work within it.

But how can we define social media algorithm?

What are Social Media Algorithms?

Social Media Algorithms were first cooked up as a way to aid the consumer in finding only the best content suitable for them and cleaning up their feeds by reducing the amount of content that would appear to them.. Sounds simple of course until you realise each site has their own individual algorithms which all follow their own individual programming and are constantly evolving. Yes Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram algorithms are all working around the clock imposing different rules that are constantly changing at the drop of a hat. And you never know when that hat will finally drop. But there is a way around it, you just have to understand this simple truth:

The Good old days are over

“Just schedule your content at the right time and repost your best content.” That was the advice social media marketers gave, and what some still give but the truth is that time is now long past. Nearly everyone after the introduction of algorithms saw a sharp decline in traffic, some even claiming that over 80% of their social media traffic vanished. You have to truly understand this, scheduling content doesn’t mean anything anymore. You are playing a different game now with different rules.

High-quality content can be seen at any time. With the focus on uplifting the best content, algorithms scan the substance of what you publish and actually show it to a sample audience and see how they react.

That’s right, even when you publish your content it isn’t directly sent to your audience right away. That sample audience’s impression of your content is paramount in deciding how far the algorithm promotes it or not.

Not only is the algorithm sending it to a sample audiences, it’s actively scanning each individual posts you make for certain keywords, rewarding and punishing a post based upon that.

For instance, did you know that asking for a share will actually harm the visibility of your post? Remember what I said about cleaning up click bait trash? So instead what you should be pushing for is instead a focus on producing genuinely good content that can stand on its own two legs.

How much should such content be promoted in this brave new world? Well according to some only once. Yes, according to Michael Stelzner of the Social Media Examiner, he promotes his content just once on Twitter and Linkedin while selectively reposting on Facebook.

Remember your content will be promoted by the algorithm depending on how much the audience loves it. It doesn’t matter how many times you repost a piece of content if the audience doesn’t care for it.

However, there is one important thing that you have to remember here as well and that is:

Good content can last you a lot longer

If you produce good content that your audiences love then it has a higher chance of greater longevity than it might have under the regular method of scheduling. The key, and this was tried effectively with Facebook was ensuring that posts were quickly liked by as many people as possible.

It is therefore necessary that before you promote any content, you develop a list of influencers and promoters. What is the difference you ask? Well an influencer is someone with great clout and followership. It could be a news site, a prominent figure within your field or just someone with a lot of followers.

A promoter on the other hand is just someone who can help like and share the piece, who helps “trick” the algorithm in heavily promoting the piece. We’ll go into more detail on how you can gain influencers and best use promoters another day but for now the most important thing to remember is that its no longer about scheduling content but instead people liking it.

And this also means the days of evergreen content are finite too. Sure, you could currently get around the algorithm by changing the text of the post as well as the picture while keeping the URL but it won’t stop the inevitable. Sooner or later and I predict much sooner the algorithm will scan even the destination of your post and that will quickly stamp out any signs of spam that it sees. With that evergreen content will have fully dried up and we will be left with nothing but our ability to produce good content for our select audience.

What does this mean then?

Optimisation is King

Producing good content is one thing but packing it with keywords that’ll see your google rank climb higher is more imperative than ever now in improving your traffic. Which leads to one question.

What is social seo?

Utilise the top smo tools like the keyword finder to discover the best optimised keywords to use, optimise your headline in order you’ll ensure your content is as attractive as possible not only to your readers but google too.

That’s the thing you have to understand now, optimisation is key. With the difficulties that now exist, optimising your content is key.

Seo and smo services are more critical than ever now.

With the benefits of SMO this has of course brought about many changes. The old days of writing short blog pieces are now perhaps entering into their sunset days as marketers discover that long form pieces, of up to 2,000 or even 3,000 words can vastly improve the SEO ranking of a piece simply by the fact you can cram as many keywords as you can into it.

CRO (conservation rate optimization) is even more necessary than ever as you’ll look to turn your audience more and more towards your site. Which brings us onto the next most impetrative thing you need to understand in this day and age:

Numbers don’t mean anything

Well, no one should lose too much hair hopefully tracking compulsively their collapsing content mileage. Instead, marketers are going to have to return back to their roots, their community.

Yes before the importance of terms like “reach” and “leads” took over each company nurtured and grew their own special community of audiences. Going back to that community building is imperative now.

Do focus instead on your mailing list, grow it to around 500–1000 and through that begin nurturing them and turning them into promoters by sending them high-quality content which addresses their paint points.

That’s one thing you have to understand if you want to “beat” the algorithms, they won’t penalise your audiences for promoting you. So do whatever you can to turn them into promoters and let them spread the good (and free news) of your business across the internet.

Think of it like this, its great to have over a million users in site traffic but how many of those actually convert into possible customers and then from there think about how many customers you actually need as a business to be successful.

That number is the community you need to grow, to nurture, to delight and to ultimately convert not just into leads but into promoters. Once again, this ties back to what I previously mentioned before about optimising your emailing list and effective content development.

With that this leads to the one final question that has followed you just all throughout this article, just how can I keep the algorithm and keep up to date with it?

Understanding the algorithm

The thing you have to understand is this, you can never beat the algorithm for long anyway. Why? Because it’s constantly changing, evolving, and growing.

Worse, each social media platform has its own algorithm each at different stages of growth and all scanning for different keywords and content to promote and punish

For example, did you know that Facebook previously announced they’re giving preference to longer videos and that users use FacebookLive will find their streams get heavily promoted? And that in doing so their non-live videos get a boost in promotion too.

Comparatively for Twitter, whose algorithm unlike Facebook is, so far at least, less refined and constantly evolving at a much higher rate, announced it would give a preference to tweets from people you follow or engage.

Include within that Instagram, Linkedin and a host of other platforms and you can see how hard it becomes to understand and beat the algorithm. You cannot grow lazy, you have to keep

up to date with the ever-changing nature of the different algorithms at play.

How do you do that? Well you can’t simply rely on Facebook or Twitter telling you I’m afraid. After all, how do you know there telling you everything? Therefore you have to experiment, to explore and follow figures & sites like Michael Stelzner and the Social Examiner.

With great change comes great opportunity however and with that let’s bring together everything we’ve learned.

So,

• Algorithms do not mean it is impossible to organically market on social media now
• Scheduling content is worthless, producing good content supported initially by a list of promoters is key
• Optimisation is key, in both SEO, CRO upon not only your site but the very content you produce. Find the best smo tools
• Community building is paramount. Grow your customers and convert them into promoters. Always manage and grow your mailing list
• Live and learn. The algorithms are constantly changing and adapting and you have to do. Do not waste time clinging to the old ways.

With all that said you’re now (hopefully) ready to greet the brave new world that social media marketing has become. Social Media algorithms are a good thing on the whole preserving UX in the end, lest some platforms may keel right over like Twitter. There usually there for more relevance, and more enjoyment out of the social media user experience. Occasionally for extra monetisation from the platform admittedly but that also has to do with simply prioritising an ever-overflowing inventory of content.

Just remember to never allow yourself to get lazy and complacent and likewise never get disheartened by a sudden slowdown or drop in traffic. There is always a way around the social media algorithm, typically that’s just by following the guidelines it set within the first place.