What Business Owners Need To Know About Social Media Algorithms

What Business Owners Need to Know About Social Media Algorithms

Contributed by SBOC Member:

Pat Miller

Founder of the Small Business Owners Community

This content was first released in the new Small Business Summary Newsletter. Subscribe below to get insights like this straight to your inbox!

Your Social Media Feed Is Not Reality

Social media algorithms don’t show you reality — they show you what keeps you scrolling. For business owners, that distinction changes everything.

Tonight is the State of the Union address. For about an hour, millions of Americans will watch the same speech in real time. For that one hour, everyone is seeing the same thing.

Then the speech ends. Everyone picks up their phone. And reality fractures.

Within seconds, your feed will show you your team’s version of what just happened. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. Your algorithm has been tuned to show you content that keeps you scrolling. And what keeps you scrolling is content that confirms what you already believe.

Algorithms do not care about truth. Their first priority is engagement.

Why This Matters to Small Business Owners

If you’re a small business owner who uses social media for marketing (and you should be), this reality affects you in two critical ways.

First, the content you consume is filtered.

The business advice, market trends, and competitor activity you see in your feed is curated to keep you engaged, not to give you an accurate picture of the market. The algorithm shows you more of what you’ve clicked on before. That creates blind spots.

Second, the content you create is filtered.

Your posts don’t reach everyone who follows you. They reach the people the algorithm thinks will engage with them. Understanding this is the difference between yelling into the void and building an audience that actually sees your content.

Navigating social media algorithms isn’t just a marketing problem, but also a business intelligence problem.

How to Navigate Social Media Algorithms

Seek primary sources. Don’t rely on your feed for business intelligence. Go directly to the data, the reports, the original interviews. Your feed will give you the reaction. You need the source.
Diversify your information diet. Follow people who disagree with you. Follow industries outside your own. The algorithm creates echo chambers. Break out intentionally.
Create content that serves, not just engages. Engagement-bait gets reach. But content that genuinely helps your audience builds trust that converts. Play the long game.
Watch the speech, not the highlights. Whenever you can, consume information in its original form before the algorithm tells you what to think about it. This applies to political speeches, industry conferences, competitor announcements, and market reports.

The Opportunity in Authenticity

In a world where algorithms reward outrage and engagement-bait, there’s a growing hunger for something real. Business owners who show up authentically, who tell the truth even when it’s not optimized for clicks, build a different kind of trust.

That trust is what converts followers into customers. And no algorithm can manufacture it.

From Businessing with Pat Miller — a daily live show for small business owners. Mon–Thu at 11am CT. Join the conversation at smallbusinesscommunity.com.

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Contributed by

Pat Miller

Founder of the Small Business Owners Community

Pat spent two decades in broadcasting management and hosting. After leaving the radio industry, he spent time consulting small businesses and realized the support system for entrepreneurs was broken. Where could you find help for improving small businesses and building real connections with other like-minded people. In June of 2020, the Idea Collective Small Business Community was born.