The Algorithm Is Not the Villain. You’re Just Using the Platform Wrong
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → The Quietly Disruptive Business Podcast
You’re posting content onto your social media platform of choice. Maybe once a day, maybe less. What you’re putting out is good — you’ve actually written it, it’s not something you fed into a prompt and hoped for the best. But the clients still aren’t arriving at your door the way you were told they would. So you change your strategy. You make reels. You film videos. You add hooks and calls to action. You post at specific times, like your own posts, only ever put links in the comments. You watch what everyone else is doing and try to reverse engineer it. And still, nothing. Marketing becomes a maze of must-dos and don’ts, and all you wanted was clients. I imagine this situation sounds very familiar…
Social Media Platforms Are Businesses. And You’re the Product
Every social media platform has an algorithm that controls how content is displayed. Going viral and getting good reach is associated with the algorithm behaving in your favour, and everything else is treated as the algorithm working against you. The belief is that if you create the right content, the algorithm will push it out and find your clients for you — like an unpaid marketing department working on your behalf.
But here’s the context that changes everything: social media platforms are businesses. They don’t exist to find your clients out of the kindness of their hearts. They exist to make money through ads and through you being on the platform. Every time you use a platform, you’re giving it data — and that data is valuable, monetisable, and saleable. You’re a walking piggy bank for the platform. When you think the algorithm isn’t working and post more content hoping to fix it, you spend more time on the platform. When it does work, you don’t want to stop, so you feed it more. Either way, the platform wins.
The Passive Founder vs the Active Founder
Most founders use social media passively. They post content and hope. They create and wait for the right person to find it. They plan everything around the algorithm, assuming that if the algorithm gods approve, clients will appear. It’s like lurking around a dance floor waiting for someone to ask you to dance. Sometimes someone will, but a far better way to guarantee an answer is to walk over and ask someone yourself.
That’s the difference between a passive founder and an active one. A passive founder creates content, posts it, and prays for notifications. An active founder creates content, posts it, and then goes out to find the conversations. They reach out to specific people. They comment on posts with genuine thought. They connect with other founders with real intention. They start conversations, ask questions, and don’t wait for clients to turn up — they go and find them.
The platform is identical in both situations. How you use it is completely different. And so are the results. When I asked fellow founders about their experience on LinkedIn, the ones who said it wasn’t working admitted they were posting and hoping. The ones who said it was working were active- reaching out, being curious, starting conversations. The algorithm wasn’t the problem in either case. The approach was.
You Don’t Need a Bigger Audience.
You Need a More Specific One.
Founders who think they need to feed the algorithm want larger audiences and more volume because they’re trying to filter through the noise to find the right people. Their offering is broad, so their net has to be wide. But a founder who knows exactly who they help and how they help them doesn’t need the algorithm to do the heavy lifting. They’re laser-focused on finding specific people who need what they offer. It’s about being intentional with your time and energy — active on the things that move you forward, rather than waiting for them to happen.
So here are two questions to sit with. First: are you using social media to broadcast one way, or to connect? And second: what would it look like to use social media in the way that actually works for you? Whatever your answers, bring them to our next blog post, where I’ll walk you through three practical shifts to help you use any platform to find and connect with the right people — without the performance, the hustle, or spending three hours a day creating content.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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