Serving Algorithms or Serving Humans?

Bob Dylan once said, you gotta serve somebody.

And today we're gonna talk about serving an audience or serving an algorithm, or if you want to, both.

Welcome to your podcast consultant, Small lessons with big value.

With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this hall of fame podcaster is a featured speaker, author and mentor to thousands.

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He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

One of my little bumper stickers is spend $100 on a microphone and spend 100 hours getting to know your audience.

Because when you know what your audience want, you can give it to them and they'll be happy because, well, it's exactly what they're looking for.

And then you have other sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube that are algorithmic in that they have an algorithm that figures out what you want and gives it to you.

And Instagram has recently announced basically their algorithm is going to change to give accounts with fewer followers a fair chance to complete to compete with the larger accounts.

Well, Instagram recently announced that their algorithm is going to actually feature followers with a smaller number to help them compete.

That sounds great.

And they say the platform is now prioritizing content distribution in the first 10 to 20 minutes after posting, showing primarily to non followers during that period, though if it doesn't really blow up, they're not going to continue to show it to more and more people.

Facebook has also made similar adjustments, which isn't surprising.

You know, again, it heavily favors posts that generate meaningful engagement regardless of the account size.

So that sounds great, but you have to know what the algorithm wants.

And so it's that algorithm that kind of says, is this good or not?

And that may be based on things like the thumbnail or the title or all these other things.

It's kind of interesting because TikTok's algorithm is known for its ability to make content from relatively unknown people go viral.

But again, that platform prioritizes new content and bases its recommendations on factors like the video details, past interactions, and user preferences.

So on one hand, it kind of knows what the audience wants, looks at your content, and either decides does this, you know, is it worthy to be shown to other people or not?

But it's kind of interesting that on one hand, as a small creator, we might go, well, this is great, I got a shot.

And the other hand, you might be making exactly what your audience wants, and if they serve it to the wrong audience, well, then you're not going to get spread.

And so I always like to just let people be informed because if you're going to be on YouTube, the content could be amazing, but you really need to watch a lot of videos to get up to speed on YouTube.

Thumbnails, the actual image for that, and then look at titles.

You might want to set up a B split.

Testing now.

What does that mean?

That means that you upload two images and I'm not sure if they include two titles, but you basically do kind of double the work and then YouTube will test these and pick the one that works the best, which is great, except again, you need double the work to have two images, two titles, whatever they need for a B split.

Testing now again, to just get you prepared, you can spend a lot of time and watch the algorithm.

And I was watching some videos on Mr.

Beast, who is the biggest YouTuber right now, and he obsesses over every detail and every thumbnail and everything else.

And the one thing you have to keep in mind and why I don't like to have all my eggs in one basket, is they will every now and then just change the algorithm.

So what used to work for you doesn't, or at least you lose a big chunk of your momentum.

Where if you're focused on people who then tell other people, that's the human algorithm, word of mouth.

And according to Jacob's media, 70% of podcasts are discovered via word of mouth, then that's an algorithm that is human based.

And so I don't know that it is one or the other or both.

I just always like to make sure that my clients are aware that when you're putting time and money into YouTube, you first.

Again, as I always say, you don't monetize a YouTube channel, you monetize an audience.

And you'll see there are standards that you must meet before you can monetize your channel.

But also realize that the same way that they may have a tool that helped you get popular, that same tool can turn off the water and you're going to go thirsty.

And so don't just use that as your one and only source of income.

Because I've heard horror stories of people that were just doing great until they weren't, and they hadn't really changed anything.

It was simply the algorithm.

And all of a sudden their Instagram, their Facebook, whatever it was dried up and then they were back to, okay, now I've got to learn not what my audience wants, but what the algorithm wants.

So keep that in mind as you're going through that.

If you're going to be adding these types of platforms that you leave time to learn the algorithm because yes, spend 100 hours getting to know your audience well, you might need another 100 hours to get to know the algorithm if you really want to compete and be in the top for your show or your content on these platforms.

Now if you need help with content, that is definitely something I can help you with.

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I'm Dave Jackson.

I want to be your podcast consultant.