By Sabri Suby

Australia’s proposed social media algorithm opt-out has already sparked plenty of speculation about what happens if users start switching off personalised recommendations and returning to feeds dominated by the accounts they actively follow.

Most of us know that personalisation is far from an incidental social media feature. It is the core product experience, as the platforms have become great at understanding what people are interested in, and then showing more of it.

If people were given a choice between content selected around their interests and a chronological stream, I suspect the majority would continue choosing personalisation.

Rather than ask what happens when the algorithm disappears, the industry must instead ask itself what type of content people actually want.

Relevance has become the distribution strategy

Content marketing used to rely on an audience choosing to follow you first. You built an email list, attracted subscribers or accumulated followers, then distributed content to that group.

Recommendation algorithms changed that model by separating reach from the size of your existing audience.

A business with 500 followers can publish something that reaches hundreds of thousands if the platform determines that it is relevant to the audience, while a brand with a huge following can publish something mediocre and watch it disappear.

This tells us something: distribution increasingly follows relevance.

Every platform is analysing an enormous range of behavioural signals, including what people stop for, what they watch, share, search for and what holds their attention. Their objective is fundamentally simple: work out what this person is likely to care about next.

Attention is the signal you are really competing for

There is still a tendency in content marketing to think in terms of volume. More posts, videos, articles and channels.

AI has now accelerated that mentality because creating content has never been easier, but the downside is the result AI produces. We’re seeing an increase in mediocre content competing for the finite amount of attention.

And producing more content will not solve the distribution problem.

In today’s social media world, the brands standing out will be the ones that understand why somebody should stop for their piece of content, rather than the 50 other things surrounding it.

That kind of result requires planning, a strong point of view, genuine utility and a story with tension. The post also needs to have a unique angle, an insight the audience has not seen before.

If your content consistently falls behind in that environment, the answer probably is not to hope for the return of chronological feeds, but to create something more relevant.

Followers may become slightly more valuable

The proposed opt-out would certainly have an impact.

Even a relatively small increase in non-algorithmic consumption could make direct follower relationships more valuable, because content from accounts somebody has actively chosen to follow becomes more important when recommendations are reduced.

That creates a stronger case for giving people a reason to follow your brand rather than simply hoping the algorithm repeatedly rediscovers them.

The same applies to searchability. Social platforms are used for search, particularly when people want recommendations, explanations, reviews or practical information. As marketers, we should be thinking about whether our content can be found deliberately as well as discovered passively.

Clear language, recognisable subject matter and content built around genuine audience questions become increasingly useful when discovery can happen through both recommendation and intent.

And you still need to own the relationship

There is also a broader lesson here that has nothing to do with the opt-out: social reach is rented.

The platform decides how content is distributed, and the rules can change, both from the government and the platforms themselves.

That is why strong content marketing needs to go beyond impressions, views or follows. It should create a path towards a relationship the business controls through email, SMS, community, direct traffic or another owned channel, while knowing discovery is not the same as ownership.

Prepare for better algorithms, not fewer of them

We certainly won’t see content marketing revert to 2012, when brands would publish to a chronological feed and hope their followers are online to see it.

The world is heading in the opposite direction.

Recommendation systems will become more sophisticated, personalised and better at understanding what people genuinely care about. That means building stronger follower relationships, making content searchable, and turning platform attention into owned audiences.

But, above all, we need to get much better at understanding relevance, because whatever happens with this particular opt-out, the fundamental equation is unlikely to change: the platforms want to show people content they are interested in.

Our job is to make sure the content passes the interest check.

Sabri Suby is the founder of King Kong

Image: Supplied

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