Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Facebook wrongly marked a link to my podcast with a prominent scholar as spam. This incident changed my entire perspective on content marketing, a discipline I have mastered over the years and used to boost the much needed Musikator’s popularity as a newly published music media.
I impulsively tried to return to posting on X, a platform I haven’t used in years since closing my account due to feeling unsafe. I had sleepless nights pondering which platform to choose, considering multiple factors, including SEO compatibility.
This morning, I saw a post on Threads, my favorite place on the internet right now, displaying a pattern of “hategagement” about a NY Times article:
Post by @davechenskyView on Threads
It’s just one bad take on daily American lives. It’s happening everywhere, nothing special about it. But more importantly, people really like to fall for it and choose to engage with these kinds of posts.
It was posted by an account that I don’t follow, but Threads’ algorithm kept shoving it into my feed. I almost took the bait and spent a few minutes drafting a comment about how a post about bad takes like this get more people to engage and prompt the algorithm to spread it further.
I know the principle of “there’s no such thing as bad promotion,” but this is what happens when I post for the algorithm, not accusing that the author of the post was: but the sophisticated machine chooses what it likes and doesn’t like, disregarding my original intention of creating the content.
I know it may sound counterintuitive, but depending on social media algorithms is totally unsustainable.
Want to reach more people? Pay more! or post rage-inducing content that people like! Before you know it, you spend more money than you can afford and do things that have nothing to do with developing high-quality content, which was the reason I started Musikator Media in the first place.
I want to stay grounded and focus on what I do best: engaging with my music network from all over the globe, digging into their knowledge for the audience, ensuring they share essential learnings, and continuing this until the website gains enough trust to make people subscribe and let me send updates directly to their personal emails whenever I post content.
So here’s my content marketing strategy moving forward: I am going to focus on targeting real human beings rather than social media algorithms. How dumb does that sound in the age of social media? Pretty dumb, but when it works, no algorithm change will be able to take away what the website has achieved.
you’re not dumb.
i’m doing the same, i can trace every single subscriber now.
Doing “slow” strategy have better effect to my own mental health too. doing algorithm marketing made me greed for dopamine.