Until the Day the Algorithm Changed

The awesome Jane Tabachnick, founder of Simply Good Press a publishing company that works with experts and thought leaders to help them reach wider audiences via book authorship and publicity, asked me to contribute insights for her article: A Gold Rush for Brands…Until [the Day] The Algorithm Changed. It is a great read. Below you can find more...

It has become harder and harder for publishers to effectively build an audience across owned and earned media platforms. No social platform is a pure activity feed. Each feed is configured to maximize its stickiness and addictiveness to get users to spend more time consuming on it. EMarketer forecasts US consumers 18+ yo will spend on average 42 min a day on Facebook, the biggest of all the social platforms. Because each social platform continuously tweaks their feed algorithm in a "black box", publishers - media or brand - have no idea how to effectively optimize their content by theme, cadence, format, length, type, etc. Some will guess the secret formula correctly and others never will. Once the feed algorithm is changed, everyone starts the guessing process over with new winners and losers. Just because a publishers gets it right once, doesn’t mean they will again.

There is a second part to the feed algorithm "changes" that has to do with money. In a bid to woo publishers into producing content for their platforms, the early days of each platform are typically marked with fantastic reach and ease of building an audience for a publisher or brand. Basically they get access to a "pure" activity feed that rewards early adopters who produce a lot of snackable useful, funny, inspiring, relatable or emotional content. 

This convinces publishers to invest massive resources in creating original content to feed the needs of the social platforms all on the promise of future revenues. Those revenues, based upon traditional disruptive models, then typically take so long to materialize in a meaningful way, that publishers begin to aggressively target selling content integrations, product placements and sponsored content posts to advertisers to drive revenue.

These forms of "native advertising" revenue do not involve the social platform because they are “baked” into the content. And with access to a "pure" feed with full audience reach, it is an attractive offering for both buyer and seller but the platform is shut out. What to do? Throttle the reach of any content that has advertising in it. The first reasons are based upon user experience - advertising is not something that users all respond well to and that can inhabit their time spent on the social platform. to make up for the throttled reach, a platform can make additional reach available to be purchased by the publisher to make up the difference and drive platform revenue. So now you have our current state of social platforms in which organic reach is throttled and cannot be relied upon so publishers have to spend money to amplify their posts.