Your cousin is not the algorithm anymore
Understanding the modern web to succeed with your business. Let’s talk.
Social feeds used to show you the people you followed. Now they show you whatever you were into this week. That is a problem if you still post like a bulletin board. It is also the only good news small businesses have had from social in a decade.
Remember when opening Facebook felt like walking into a room? Your cousin was there. So was the person you sat next to in Grade 11 chemistry. So was that business page you followed in 2014 because you liked the owner, or because they gave you a cookie if you hit the button.
The deal was simple. You followed people and pages. Those people and pages showed up. A small shop posted the way you pin a notice on a corkboard: we are open, here is the special, please tell your friends.
Follower count felt like the whole sport because, for a while, it was. If they had not joined your little club, they were not going to see the note.
That room still exists, sort of. It is just not where most of the evening happens anymore.
What you actually see when you open the app
Be honest for a second about your own phone.
You watched two videos about sourdough. Or porches. Or a lake you cannot afford. Or a dog that can open a fridge. Three days later the feed has decided this is your personality. You are now on nodding terms with a stranger in another province who makes the same loaf. Your cousin had a baby. You found out from your sister, in a text, on Thursday.
That is not a glitch. That is the product.
The apps noticed something rude and commercially useful: people stay longer when they see what they are in the mood for right now, not a greatest-hits reel of everyone they once agreed to follow. Interests move fast, too. Cottage-brain can last a season.
A sudden obsession with one recipe can last an afternoon. The feed does not care. It will serve the mood and then, when the mood leaves, it will serve the next one.
People who need a label call it interest media. You do not need the label. You already live in it.
The feed is matching an itch, not a friendship. Some of those itches become part of who you are. Most of them are just what you pointed at this week. Either way, the old promise — “follow us and you will see us” — is a much smaller promise than it used to be.
This is annoying. It is also the opening.
If you run a small place, the old sport was exhausting. You were never going to out-follow a chain, or a guy in a bigger city with a ring light and a Tuesday content calendar. Interest media shrugs at that scoreboard. A stranger can see the thing you made if the thing matches something they already wanted.
They do not have to know your name first. They do not have to have liked your page in 2019.
The other side of that sentence is less friendly. The feed is not listening for your logo. It is not waiting for “We’re open!!” It is not moved by a stock photo of cutlery and the word rustic. Those posts still work on the people who already love you.
They do almost nothing for the person who is in the mood for a Saturday patio, a new tap, or a loaf, and does not yet know you exist.
You can keep posting like it is a newsletter to the fan club. Just do not be surprised when the fan club is the only room that hears it.
Two pictures
A restaurant posts the name of the restaurant, in a nice font, over a slightly blurry interior. Caption: Support local! Another post, same week: a plate that could only be Saturday lunch oa sidewalk, light a bit too bright, someone halfway through the bread.
You can guess which one the feed knows how to file. One is a brand. One is an itch called “I want to sit down outside and eat something.”
Same trick, different counter. A hardware store can post a logo and the words family owned since whenever. Or it can post the washer that actually fixes the tap everyone in town has been swearing at.
You do not need a caption workshop. You need to ask, before you hit post, what mood this would belong to if the person had never heard of you. If the honest answer is “the mood of being already your customer,” you are back on the corkboard.
Take a picture of the actual Tuesday
Interest media is fussy in a way that helps you. It rewards the particular. A photo that could only have been taken at your place, on that day, in that weather, with those hands, is easy for a feed to match to a feeling. “Great atmosphere!!” is hard to match to anything, because it is not a feeling. It is a brochure.
This is the opposite of a brand film. You do not need a drone over Main Street.
You need the Tuesday that is actually in front of you: the tray, the window, the dog tied up outside, the special that will be gone by two. Document the place. Leave the cinematic version for people who have a different job.
One thing, this week
You do not need a new strategy deck. Try this.Make one piece as if the person does not follow you. No logo-first. No “we’re open.” A real itch, a real picture of this week. Put it on the page you already have. Do not boost it. Wait.
Then look at it next to the last handful of posts — not next to some stranger’s viral video, next to you. If it did more than your normal, you learned what the feed can actually recognize. If it did not, you learned that cheaper than an ad. Either way, do not buy a megaphone for a whisper. Spend, if you spend at all, on the piece that already had a pulse.
And when someone does care, they will search you. Hours, a couple of honest photos, a review that is not from 2021. That part is not glamorous. It is just what happens after the itch. Do not spend two days on a caption and then greet them with last winter’s Christmas turkey.
You do not need to become a media company
The internet is full of people who will tell you to post everywhere, every day, on a dozen accounts, until the algorithm falls in love. That is a job. It is not your job.Your job is to stop posting like it is still 2014 in the group chat.
One piece that matches a mood will do more than ten pieces that announce the business to itself. If this helped you see your own feed a little more clearly, that is the whole assignment.
The cousin will still have another baby. You will hear about that one from your sister too.