The Algorithm Doesn’t Hate You

By Kayla Zigic

“The Algorithm Hates me” and “no one sees my content anymore” are a few statements I see far too often on social media. I get it; it can be frustrating when you spend time creating content, writing captions, and posting for you to feel like your content hasn’t performed as well as you expected. You feel annoyed and unmotivated and probably think, “why am I even bothering?”.

Now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, because I strongly believe that the algorithm does hate you; in fact, it is designed to push content out to your audience that they would be more inclined to engage with based on content they have previously engaged with. So, this leads me to wonder, is it the algorithm or your content?

Have you heard the saying, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”? This statement is also true when it comes to your social media. Social media has evolved a lot in the past few years, and engagement is the lowest it has ever been. This is because there is more competition for feed space than ever before.

Instagram users have risen by 24 billion in the past two years alone, with 102 billion users in 2020 to 128 billion in 2022 and a projection of 144 billion users by 2025. So, being seen is harder than ever, and we must rethink our strategies. We can no longer post a before and after with the caption “skin goals” and expect our audience to swoon. We now need to be strategic.

How to create content your audience and the algorithm will love.

Understand your target audience.

Before creating a strategy for content for your social media, we first need to understand your target audience. How old are they, do they work, what do they do, what are their spending habits, and most importantly, what are their problems and pain points?

Create content that addresses and solves your target audience’s problems.

Your followers want to be educated, to be told how you can help them, and to be told what end result they can achieve by the services you provide. Gone are the days when followers happily engage in a static post with a statement as the caption. You need to address their pain points to build curiosity, explain and give a solution.

Post without purpose.

It’s easy enough just to put up a post, but is there a purpose being your posts? For E.g., I want this post to create engagement, get inquiries, build brand awareness, or build brand authority. Before posting, you must decide what you want to achieve from your post and write your captions to match your objective.

Use “Hooks” to entice your audience to click “read more.”

So often, when creating a caption, we have no real purpose in mind, and we usually create it in a rush and type anything that’s “quick.” Start using open-ended questions over statements. It would help if you started speaking to that target audience directly and tapping into their pain points.

For example: Instead of saying “Before and After” try “Real Results using (insert treatment/product here,” or instead of saying “Let us fix your skin!” try Do you suffer from (insert skin concern here). Start living in the minds of your target audience and create captivating captions that will “hook” them in.

Posting when your audience is active

Check your insights, see when your audience is most active, and start posting around these times. The idea is to get as many potential eyes on your post as possible, and this can be hard if you post at 9 pm when your audience is winding down, not online, or asleep. That would mean your post is idle for over 6hrs before your audience is awake.

Start using Call to Actions.

You must ask for it if you want to start a conversation with your audience. Try using hooks and Call to Action like “Did you know this” “What are your thoughts” and “Can you help me.” Try and get creative as opposed to using the same “Book Now, Link in Bio” call to action because why would someone feel enticed to engage?

The algorithm is designed to sort and push out content your followers and target audience will most likely engage in. If they haven’t engaged with yours recently, the algorithm will see it as they are not interested in the content you’re creating and will continue not to push it out to your audience, this is why you need to start changing things up.

It can be natural to blame the algorithm before yourself. We put so much time and effort into our content, but is it enough anymore? We need to realise everything around us is changing, including social media as a platform, your followers needs and the type of posts and content they want to consume.

Kayla Zigic

www.socialsforsalons.com.au