Social media can feel like an absolute minefield when it comes to reaching new audiences. There’s one part of social media that I think people can find particularly frustrating: trying to tip the social media algorithms in their favour.
In this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I’m going to tell you how to tip the algorithms in your favour… not by jumping through a bunch of hoops and setting up 95,000 different rules for yourself. But by taking a long-term approach to your social media growth, and making sure that you make the algorithms your friend.
Social media algorithms are very kind to me. But that’s because I have been kind to them and I have always taken a long-term approach when it comes to tipping social media algorithms in my favour.
If you want to do the same – you want to get out of the algorithm short-term, tying-yourself-in-knots, what’s-the-algorithm-doing-now dramas, and you want to tip those algorithms in your favour, then make sure that you stay tuned to this episode of the podcast.
Let’s dive in!
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Check out the Take Off program – tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Grab my free Fast-Track Your Business training – tashcorbin.com/fasttrack
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The first thing I want to say when it comes to social media algorithms is do not tie yourself in knots trying to understand every single little nuance, change and rule that social media marketers tell you you need to follow in order to tip the algorithms in your favour.
Social media marketers and mentors have a vested interest in convincing you that social media algorithms need to be kept up-to-date with on a minute-to-minute basis. That keeps you plugged into their content feed. That keeps you plugged into buying their latest offer, which has new social media algorithm updates and the latest insights from the social media algorithms.
Yes, social media algorithms are constantly being updated. But as a creator on social media, that does not mean that you need to know about every single change to the algorithm.
I can already hear all the #ButTash’s… how do you then ensure the algorithm is showing your content to the right people if you’re not across all the updates?
I have a really effective strategy for you that is algorithm update-proof.
The reason why this strategy is update-proof is because it is built on the long-term non-changing truths of social media algorithms.
Instead of taking a short-term focus and getting yourself caught up chasing all the latest insights and updates to the algorithms (such as not putting links in posts because those posts will penalised… but then the algorithm updating to penalise having the links in comments), get out of the social media algorithm update feed.
Get out of that chain, because all you’re doing is chasing. Chasing the algorithms, chasing the updates, chasing the latest insights.
It keeps you consuming fear-based content from social media gurus who are just trying to keep you caught in that fear-based cycle.
If they keep you afraid of the algorithm, then they’ll keep you tapping into their content and buying their products. That’s what I want to get you out of.
You didn’t start an online business to be kept in a fear cycle of all of the algorithm updates and constantly abandoning every strategy you set up.
We are creating long-term strategic growth of your business and long-term algorithm love by remembering that the algorithm is ultimately built on one core principle.
That core principle has never changed.
The core principle that has never changed is that the algorithm is designed to show people content that they want to see.
The way that the algorithm measures the content that people want to see has changed in little nuances here and there. But ultimately, the number one driver of your content getting shared further is engagement.
Engagement drives reach.
When you know that, you can build a long-term approach where the algorithm comes to you, instead of you bending to the will of the algorithm.
I have eight things that you can do as your long-term strategy to tip the algorithms in your favour. The more consistently you do this, the more consistently the algorithms will reward you.
This is built on that one core principle that the algorithm’s job that never changes is to show content to people that are wanting to see that content.
1. Use a Facebook Page, not a Profile
This one is only relevant for Facebook, but all the other tips with be for both Facebook and Instagram.
If you are going to build a social media presence on Facebook for your business that scales to larger and larger audiences, build it on a Facebook page, not a profile.
We have a range of different profiles available now on Facebook:
- Personal Profile (it is against the Facebook Terms and Conditions to use a profile for business)
- Creator Profile (this is not a scalable presence on Facebook)
- Facebook Page (this is the number one place you want to be building an audience on Facebook)
Not in a group, not on a profile… on a page.
That is often what social media marketers will say is the one place not to build it.
That is where fear-based marketing will say there’s no reach there. You can’t grow an audience on a Facebook page. They are teaching you that because they want to keep you in a short-term algorithm cycle.
We’re not taking a short-term approach here.
Yes, we’re going to grow your audience in the short term. But we also want a long-term scalable approach.
A profile is not scalable. You can only have 500 friends, and the way that you get followers on a profile is all completely organic. You cannot pay for ads on a profile – creator or otherwise.
You’ll also find that for most people who teach Facebook creator profile strategy, their number one strategy to get to your first 5,000 followers on a profile is to friend request strangers without their permission. They tell you to go into Facebook groups, engage with a bunch of people on really vapid surface level, and then friend-request them.
It is built on lies. It is not consent-based.
It’s built on deception and it is not scalable long term. It is a very short-term strategy.
In the short term, it relies on you bypassing people’s consent, manipulating and misleading people, and then swooping in and making sales to them.
When most people find out what the longer-term strategy is with this kind of profile-based strategy, they’re absolutely turned off.
A lot of people have lost their profiles on Facebook because of these strategies. It opens you up to more hackers and more reports. A lot of people end up losing their profiles because they switch over to creator profile, they followed those strategies, and ultimately, it wasn’t scalable anyway.
My number one tip for managing the algorithm is that you build everything on a Facebook page because it’s:
1. Scalable
2. Less likely to get hacked
3. Far easier to protect
4. A long-term strategy that you can build based on consent-based approaches
It means that you’re only growing your audience with people who want to be there, who want to hear from you, instead of bringing them in on a deceptive or misleading practice.
2. Engagement always drives reach
Your number one measure of the success of your social media approach – whether it be on Facebook, Instagram or otherwise – is not reach… it’s engagement.
It’s not how many people are following you… it is engagement.
If you address everything based on engagement, you will be focused on the metric that is most likely to result in growth.
In order to tip the algorithm in your favour, ensure that you are focused on strategies that grow engagement.
Don’t focus on strategies that get you more followers or more reach. Focus on strategies that get you more engagement.
That will often mean that you are able to put the blinkers on and ignore a bunch of the fear-based stuff out there because most of it talks about how to get more reach and followers.
If that’s what they’re teaching, they’re actually not teaching you strategies that are going to directly correlate with long-term growth and making sales in the short term.
They’re teaching you vanity strategies to get vanity metrics.
Engagement always drives reach. Engagement is your number one focal point in terms of data.
3. Use a variety of post formats
Don’t buy into all the advice telling you that you HAVE to do reels now because reels have the best engagement… or you HAVE to do only picture posts, or only video posts, etc.
Always engage with a variety of post formats on whatever social platform you’re focused on.
On Facebook, don’t ONLY share posts that have a picture and some words. Or don’t ONLY do Facebook Lives. It’s not just about doing one type of post. You should have a variety of posts because there are short-term times when Facebook and Instagram will preference different types of posts, but that will fluctuate.
For example, we saw Instagram prioritising reels for a while when it was trying to compete with TikTok. Now that Instagram is trying to differentiate itself from TikTok, we are seeing more preferencing for static posts. But there are hundreds of thousands of people who stopped doing feed posts on Instagram because, for that period, feed posts were not being prioritised.
Now they have to go and change everything again. Their Instagram profile has a huge void where there’s no feed post.
The algorithm doesn’t know to prioritise their feed posts because it has no data on whether their audience likes and engages with their feed posts, seeing as they haven’t been sharing them for a year.
That’s where we don’t buy into the short-term advice.
We consistently share a variety of post formats.
Facebook was prioritising Facebook Lives for a long time, and then it started to deprioritise them. If during the time that Facebook was prioritising Lives, you changed your strategy to be mostly Facebook Lives, you would then suffer when the next algorithm update came out.
If instead you just used a variety of different post formats, you would not suffer. You would merely see an increase in the reach of your other types of posts without your Facebook Lives going down in their reach.
That’s where we see great growth when Instagram and Facebook updates come.
When the algorithm updates come, I see a growth in my reach and engagement across the board (in most cases). This is because I’m taking a long-term approach and I make the algorithm come to me.
If everything that I do is through the lens of knowing that the algorithm wants to feed my content to people who want to see it, I’m going to build my strategy to train the algorithm that my audience want to see and engage with my content.
If I’m training algorithms to understand that about my content, I will always be prioritised. That is my experience and that is the experience of my clients who follow this strategy as well.
Use a variety of post formats.
On Facebook, you want some:
- Posts with images
- Images that have words on them
- Images that don’t have words on them (ie. a selfie, a professional shot, an image of your office, a picture of your dog, the view from a restaurant, etc.)
- Facebook Lives
A lot of people brand every single photo that they put on social media… that’s a mistake.
You want some of your social media posts to just look like someone’s holiday snap or a photo of someone’s desk. Because it’s social media. We don’t want it to look like an ad.
Which brings me to the next point…
4. Don’t make your content look like ads
The more your words read like an ad, the more people think it’s an ad. The more your images look like ads, the more people think it’s an ad.
What is the number one type of post that people will be most likely to scroll past on social media? ADS! So why are you trying so hard to make your posts look like ads?
You want your posts to look more like organic content.
That is why I do not recommend that all of your images have your website at the bottom of them (looks like an ad), have your logo on them (looks like an ad), or have words across them (looks like an ad).
Use that sporadically. Have a variety of different image types and ways that you post on social media, and you’re going to have more of your content look like organic social content.
That’s the stuff that stops the scroll.
Similarly, think about the first sentence of your captions on Instagram and your posts on Facebook.
If people’s scroll is stopped by the image or the video, the next thing that will determine whether they stay engaged with that content is the first sentence.
Does that first sentence subconsciously tell them that you’re a business owner trying to sell them something? Or does that first sentence grab people’s attention? Is it a nice hook? Does it have a great question? Is it a power statement? Does it reflect something that they’re experiencing right now? Does it get their attention?
I’m not saying that every single post needs to be controversial to get people in. You can use that sporadically – it does tend to get people reading. But if you’re constantly using very hooky language, again, it starts to read like an ad.
Just be mindful: that first sentence is an important one.
Don’t make the first sentence about you all the time.
Often when I scroll through someone’s Facebook page, I notice that every single post starts with “I”:
“I’m so excited to share with you…”
“I was thinking the other day…”
“I have this great idea…”
It’s very self-oriented. Have some of your content on social media speak to the other person:
Be mindful that you’re using a big variety.
There’s no such thing as a hard-and-fast rule of the top hundred first sentences to use on social media. If you download one of those freebies that give you the hundred opening lines you should use in your posts, then just think about the fact that you and thousands and thousands of other people will all be using those same opening lines.
For your content to not look like ads, my number one piece of advice is for you to write your own content. Stop looking for swipe files, stop looking for templates, and stop looking at other people’s content. Start learning how to converse socially on social media. Start learning how to talk to your audience.
Make sure that you’re looking at your highest-performing content and see why. What was the opening line on that one? What got people’s attention? Why did they engage with that one?
The more that you learn from your own content and work out what your audience engages with and what works for your audience, the more impervious you’ll be to other people’s fear-based marketing telling you you’re not using the right opening lines.
That’s my fourth tip to nail the algorithms.
5. Presence
You need to be there.
Long term, social media algorithms are going to reward engagement. Engagement comes from your audience engaging with your content.
If your social media is a ghost town where you just chuck a bunch of content that people engage with but then never get a reply because you’re never there and you never do anything live, then your engagement will drop. You’re teaching the algorithm that you’re not there.
It will get less reach and it will get less engagement. If it gets less engagement, it gets less reach.
You want to take some time to be social with your audience. Be present, be engaged.
I check my own Facebook page every day that I’m working on my business.
I don’t work on my business every single day – it may be three, four or five days depending on the week. And I do get notifications when people DM my page and my Instagram profile because I want to message people back. That’s something that’s really important to me. It still works for me as a social media lead-generation strategy, and it’s really valuable for my business.
There’s probably going to come a time when I get too many DMs so I’ll turn some of those notifications off and engage with it in a different way. But for now, they stay on.
Even if you just visit your page on social media every day that you’re working on your business, and just have a little scroll through to see:
- What was your most recent content?
- Were there any comments that people made that you missed?
- Have you got any unanswered messages?
Even if you pre-schedule every post onto your socials, I would still recommend that you do some form of live content and something organically from time to time. Because that organic presence proves that you are there. That social media channel is measuring that. Your presence will help tip the algorithm in your favour and it is rewarded on a long-term basis.
6. Consistency will beat flash-and-crash every single day of the week
If you get all excited about social media, and you post three times a day for three weeks, and then you disappear for three weeks, only to then get excited again and post three times a day before disappearing again, then that is less effective for growing your engagement (and therefore your reach) on social media than just having one post a day the entire time.
Just one post a day.
If you can’t do one post a day consistently, I would aim to get to that as quickly as you can. In the meantime, do three posts a week, but do it consistently.
Consistency is far more valuable to you from an algorithm training perspective than having lots and lots of posts go out.
Quantity of content is only effective in growing engagement and reach if it is sustained consistently.
Get to one post a day like clockwork without any interruption or drama before ever committing to increasing the level of content that you put up on socials.
Consistency beats flash-and-crash every single time.
7. Record your results monthly, review them quarterly
Take a monthly reporting approach because some social media measures can only be collected monthly.
Every month, my team collects for me:
- Audience size
- Engagement
- Reach on my social channels
- Top ten posts for the month
- Bottom three posts for the month
But I don’t look at that and make any changes to my social media on a month-by-month basis. I only make changes quarterly.
The reason for that is that means we get out of those short-term social fluctuations and we look at a long-term growth approach.
This is how you bring the algorithm to you instead of racing to meet the algorithm.
I’m confident in my social media strategy. I still share links in my posts on social media. I don’t use hashtags because they’re just bot magnets. Not interested.
I do not buy into a bunch of that short-term fear-based stuff because I can see on a month-by-month basis exactly what works and what doesn’t work on my social channels. I know how to pivot and adjust. And I’ll only do that quarterly.
I can confidently schedule my content for the next quarter and know that I am taking care of things and doing the right things for my business. I’m growing my engagement and I’m growing my reach.
If there is anything that changes or if there’s anything in my strategy that needs to change, that’s for next quarter.
Think about how much freedom that creates from a business owner’s perspective, and how much more enjoyable social media must feel for me than it feels for someone who is constantly questioning what they need to do, how they need to change, and wondersing what they did wrong on a monthly basis when they see a drop in their numbers. In reality, it could just be one of those normal fluctuations.
We want to look at long-term trends.
We’re not doing a micro-analysis of your results.
For me, because I’m recording my top ten posts and my bottom three posts each month, in that quarterly review, I can clearly see what has consistently been in the top and bottom, and I can look for trends.
I’ve shared on previous podcast episodes that there was a time when my posts that were sharing fresh podcast episodes were consistently my poorest-performing posts.
My team were helping to write those posts, and it just wasn’t working on my socials. We changed things up so that now I write a couple of promo posts when I record the podcast, and the team schedule them for me. Those posts are way more conversational and they’re written in my voice.
Since we’ve started doing that, those podcast-sharing posts perform far more effectively and they don’t show up in the bottom three posts on my socials as consistently now.
I made that change because I reviewed it on a longer-term basis and could see that there were changes that needed to be made.
I didn’t do that because it popped up once in a bottom three post one month. I’m looking for patterns and trends.
Report on your results monthly, but review and make changes quarterly.
8. Pay for ads
That should be the goal for your social media channel in the long term.
Long term, you should be looking to invest in ads. Why? Because that’s scalable.
If you are looking at your social media for the rest of time and you say to yourself that you’re never going to spend money on ads, then you are saying that you’re going to rely on organic strategies alone forever.
There is one way to save yourself a ton of time with social media: pay for ads.
If it’s not your long-term goal to get to the point where you’re making so much money from your business that you’re able to spend money on ads to grow your audience, reach and engagement, and get in front of fresh audiences by just paying to be there, then I think that’s quite short-sighted.
It’s like trying to do everything with your hands tied behind your back.
Paid ads on social media are still one of the most cost-effective ways to get in front of new and targeted audiences and engage your audience on social media.
But if you haven’t done the organic stuff to start with, then you’re just doing it based on making stuff up.
That’s where it can be very costly. You’re experimenting with your money.
Don’t experiment with your money. Experiment with organic strategies. Embed your organic strategies. Get that long-term approach to your organic social media strategies working well, and then up-level based on proven social strategies by paying for ads.
Those ad strategies will be built on what’s already working.
I’ve worked with many different ad strategists in the past, and every single one of them has said within a month of us working together that I am a dream for them to work with – that I’m getting far better results than most of their clients because I have such great baseline organic strategies in place. I have an already engaged audience, I have long-term algorithm love, and because of that, my ads are cheaper and work more effectively.
Ad strategists have a field day running ads for me.
I can also get great results with really basic ads myself because I know that I’ve got that baseline of my organic strategies working well long term that I can lean on.
Make sure that you’re not being short-sighted about what you’re going to do with social media.
Right now, you might not have the budget to spend on ads. But it shouldn’t be your goal forever to not have the budget to spend on ads.
Set a goal that you’re going to get to the point where instead of putting time in to get money out of social media, you put money in to get money out of social media.
When you graduate to that point, you can strip back the time that you’re putting into socials, and instead invest that time in other value-add strategic ways in your business.
Your money can be doing the audience growth for you.
All of this might make you think that you have to be spending hours and hours a day on social media. Do not take that home as a lesson from this podcast, because I did not say that at all.
Your social media strategy can (and I think should) be around 30 minutes or less per day.
Ultimately, if you want to be on social media more than 30 minutes a day, go for it.
I’m on social media more than 30 minutes a day on days where I want to be. I’ll do an extra Facebook Live or I’ll hang out on social media because I’m bored and want to hang out with people.
But when it comes down to it, the things that I do consistently on social media that result in my biggest growth in terms of audience growth, engagement, lead generation, and sales from my social media activities are done in far less than 30 minutes a day.
20% of my effort gets me 80% of my result. My 20% effort that gets me 80% of results is about 15 minutes a day.
Sharing your posts on social media is just a tiny part of the process.
We want to get to the point where creating and sharing posts on social media is very streamlined, straightforward, easy for you to do, and time-effective.
One of the ways that I have helped people to do that in the past is through the Imperfect Post Project.
This is something that I’ve run inside my Take Off program and with the Planning System in the past, where we spend a couple of weeks putting together 100 posts that go out over 100 days on your primary social media channel.
There is also an Imperfect Post Project retreat coming up in 2025.
I wanted to share that because having run the IPP a few times now, I can tell you that the biggest light bulb people have from engaging in this and doing this process is how much time and brain space it was previously taking up for them to think about managing their social media.
That’s because they hadn’t been strategic about crafting their post strategy. They were just trying to come up with a post each day, or figuring out on a weekly basis. Many of them were just collecting templates and post ideas from other people.
They hadn’t taken the time to think about:
- What is my long-term strategy?
- What is it that the post needs to do?
- How is the post going to do that?
- How can I craft posts that work within my strengths?
For a lot of people, the biggest shift they get from doing the IPP is that they can step out of that content creation cycle and see that they can focus on the real business growth that comes from social media rather than thinking that posting a post a day on social media is what gets growth. It’s not. It’s one part of the picture.
When you can get that part of the picture taken care of strategically and quickly, then you have more time to focus that 15 minutes a day on social media on what gets you results. You can validate by making sales, rather than chasing cold audience eyeballs, chasing ways to make posts that reach more people, and chasing ways to create reels that go viral without resulting in any growth in your business.
There are different things that we do on social media that grow our results and grow our sales. Most of that is not the posts that you share on social media.
The posts you share on social media are the baseline.
On top of that, we have your engagement on social media, we have lead generation, nurturing relationships with your audience, getting to know the members of your audience, striking up conversations, having DM conversations, and getting people onto your mailing list.
There are other things that we do.
For most people, they’re so tied up in knots just trying to get their posts out that they haven’t even started to think about the other parts of the process. But the other parts of the process are what gets you results.
If you haven’t got your daily posts going out on social media, find a way to get that sorted sooner rather than later.
If you are looking for further support with this and you’re not consistently getting hot leads from social media and making sales, my Take Off program is the best place to get that support.
The Take Off program includes the Imperfect Post Project. It also includes getting the foundations of your business validated, and how to make sales quickly through validating your messaging and your niche.
The Take Off program is the best way to do that.
I understand that for some people that’s not available to them at this point in time. It is an investment to join the Take Off program.
It is a mentorship program – you get my ongoing mentorship through the process – so it’s priced appropriately for that.
I understand that’s not available to everyone,
Firstly, I recommend you go and check out the Take Off program (tashcorbin.com/takeoff) and have a look and see if that is something that you would be interested in. If it’s not right now for you, you can either join the waitlist (because doors aren’t always open) or you might set that as something that you want to do in the future.
Secondly, you’re welcome to reach out and let me know that you’re interested in the Take Off program but it’s not for you right now, and let me know why. Often there are free resources that I can share with you or little things that I can help with to help you move forward.
Furthermore, if I can see that the Take Off program wouldn’t actually be a fit for your business, then I can often recommend someone else for you to follow or another program to look at.
I’m not afraid to tell people not to join the Take Off program if it’s not the right fit. But that would be the best place to go if you know social media algorithms are tying you up in knots and you’re doing lots of work but not getting the restuls.
The Take Off program is definitely the best place for me to help you and support you with that in terms of the whole strategy and how it all fits together.
You can find out more about the Take Off program at: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
I do also have a free training that I recommend called Fast-Track Your Business.
In that Fast-Track training, we take a bit of a step back from the detailed step-by-step strategy and look at:
- What is it that you’re currently doing?
- Which of the things that you’re currently doing to grow your business is going to fast-track your results (ie. get you sales in the short term)?
- Are there some gaps in that strategy?
- What is the strategy that you can use to get sales sooner in your business?
It’s a very practical training in terms of helping you to assess your existing strategy, but also helping to fill some of those gaps.
You can find that free training here: tashcorbin.com/fasttrack
And if you want to go far deeper and get my mentoring, check out the Take Off program here: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
I hope that you can see that by taking a long-term approach to tip the algorithms in your favour, you save yourself a bunch of time, headaches, heartache and fear.
Over the long term, you’ll do better. And over the short term, you’ll be able to focus your time, energy and attention on things that make sales rather than just trying to work the social media magic.
I’ve had someone come to work with me who had 120,000 followers on Facebook, but they were making less than 10 sales of their $100 product a month.
That is the result of following all the fear-based social media stuff.
That is the result of being overly focused on reach and audience growth and not focused on long-term results in terms of sales, engagement and connection with your audience.
She had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years to build that audience. And she built an audience of people who weren’t engaging and weren’t buying.
That can be turned around, but I’d rather that you build an audience full of action-takers, engagers, and people who are there because they want to hear from you from the outset. Then you’re going to make far more sales from day one rather than waiting.
This person had said to herself that once she got 100,000 followers then surely she’d make more sales. But she got to 120,000 followers and still hadn’t fixed the underlying issue. That’s why she came to me.
Don’t end up in her situation. Don’t fall for the short-term algorithm rhetoric. Look at the long-term growth.
If you’re looking for more support with that, please do come and check out the Take Off program and Fast-Track Your Business freebie.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
