Why You Should Ignore the Algorithms and Focus on Marketing Strategy Instead

Here’s some advice I shared with an audience at Social Media Conference Suriname about marketing strategy, and I want you to hear it too.

And try to ignore the algorithms. I know that’s hard. I get it. We want to be successful. We want to go viral. We want our clients to go viral. Right? We want them to see success. And often times success has to do with likes and engagement and shares and those kinds of things. And so it can be really easy to fall into the trap of reading about the latest algorithm changes on Instagram or TikTok or some other platform and trying to create an entire strategy and bucket full of tactics that does nothing but take advantage of what we think the algorithm wants.

And the problem, of course, there is A, we’re not really ever sure what the algorithm wants. It’s based on somebody’s anecdotal evidence. Hey, I put a link in the first comment and that post took off. Maybe you should do that too.

And then, B, the algorithms change. They change faster than we do. They change in ways that are transparent and harder to identify. And the advice that we read today in a blog post that might have been written six months ago probably won’t apply tomorrow.

So I’m encouraging you to avoid thinking too much about the algorithms. It’s alright to have some awareness of what they are, what they do, how they’re impacting content today. But just don’t focus on them.