The most challenging conversation to have with brands is one that defies a commonly held belief: great content is enough. For decades, the marketing industry has abided by the same foundational belief that if they create something worthy of attention, their target audience will naturally engage with it. But this approach is a liability for both their reach and revenue.
Today, brands are rapidly losing ground to content creators and bot farms, which each exhibit stronger algorithmic intelligence. Recommendation engines are governed by engagement velocity rather than resonance. Regardless of quality, the content that ultimately keeps users on the platform longest–watching, liking, sharing, and saving videos—wins.
Social media platforms are not in the business of rewarding creativity; they amplify what keeps users coming back. According to TikTok’s internal data, scrolling habits can form in as little as 35 minutes, and within a week, casual users grow to watch 40% more videos than when they first started. Understanding how an algorithm weighs engagement and what content behaviors it rewards demands immediate attention.
Strategists and CMOs who still operate based on maps drawn by someone else end up making multi-million-dollar decisions without understanding that the map perpetually shifts with consumer behavior.
WITH ALGORITHMIC LITERACY, HACKING FOR GOODIS POSSIBLE
Algorithms have limited spots to earn a share of users’ feeds. When manipulated content fills those spots, your authentic content gets pushed down. So, if a competitor artificially boosts their content to gain wider traction, they are not just inflating their numbers; they are suppressing yours, too.
In turn, when competitive benchmarks appear distorted relative to a competitor’s manufactured performance, unsuspecting brands often turn inward. They restructure their entire marketing department, lose confidence in their story, and in some cases, succumb to both. It is a zero-sum game, and the honest player focused solely on authentic storytelling loses, time and time again.
Great brand storytelling still matters in today’s attention economy. It just requires a narrative that reverse engineers the behavioral signals these systems reward. The launch of Cardi B’s recent hair care brand, Grow-Good Beauty, is a case in point. It was hard to miss across social feeds because it was built on years of genuine audience understanding.
Since 2016, long before her product existed, she had been sharing her hair journey and her DIY masks across platforms. By launch day, the algorithm already knew what would capture her audience’s (and their network’s) attention based on their history of likes, shares, and saves.
4 STRATEGIES FOR ALGORITHM DIFFERENTIATION
The brands winning consumer attention are using strategies their competitors are not. These four tips can help you differentiate your brand too.
1. Build your own algorithmic curriculum. Stay tuned into what is next by subscribing to publications that track platform policy and behavioral trends. Industry newsletters like Marketing Brew, Hootsuite’s annual reports, WGSN trend analytics, and posts by LinkedIn thought leaders in related categories help you stay informed. Set alerts for platform updates to know what is being tested and prioritized.
2. Develop 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans. The first 30 days are about immersing yourself in the brand, auditing your platforms, and understanding how algorithms work right now and not two months ago.
Study top-performing content by the behaviors it is designed to drive. The next 60 days are about testing different versions of the same message to see what the system amplifies. By 90 days, it is about integrating what you have learned and embedding it into your brief, with a monthly cadence to assess content performance.
3. Know that your website is your primary residence, and social media is your summer home. Good brands invest in their own channels. They invest time and resources into their email, SMS, and community platforms where they have control and influence. Focus on social media but know that your summer house is not where you keep all your good furniture.
4. Slow down long enough to build a genuine connection with your customers. This one seems obvious, but many brand leaders are dropping the ball on this step. With AI, the pressure to churn out content is palpable. When everyone can produce content at a rapid pace, great storytelling alone is no longer the differentiator. Feeds flooded with AI slop overwhelm consumers, and people can feel when you are feeding them low-effort content. Knowing and building with your audience is a signal no algorithm can manufacture.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This is the new algorithmic literacy. The ethical marketers who build a deep, technical, and behavioral understanding of how systems work will reach more of the right consumers, outpace their competitors, and build the kind of enduring relevance audiences will remember.
Rakia Reynolds is a partner at Actum.