There's a particular kind of content that has taken over social media in the last few years. You know it the moment you see it. A bold, provocative statement designed to trigger a reaction. A carousel that promises "7 secrets to 10x your engagement" while delivering nothing of substance. A Reel that shamelessly copies whatever trend is dominating the Explore page that week, with a brand logo clumsily stitched into the corner. It's content that was never made for a human being. It was made for a machine.
And it's making social media worse for everyone — brands included.
After twelve years of running social strategy for hospitality, tourism, and fashion brands at Cohen Media House, I've watched the industry's relationship with algorithms evolve from healthy awareness to full-blown obsession. The obsession has produced a generation of brand content that is technically optimised and spiritually empty. And the irony is thick: in the race to appease the algorithm, most brands have produced content so generic and forgettable that the algorithm doesn't even favour it anymore.
The Metrics That Don't Matter
Let's start with the uncomfortable truth. The metrics most brands obsess over — reach, impressions, follower count — are vanity metrics. They feel good in a monthly report. They make a bar chart go up and to the right. But they have an almost negligible correlation with the things that actually drive a business: genuine engagement, purchase intent, brand sentiment, customer loyalty, and conversions.
I've seen this play out dozens of times. A brand will come to us after a year of working with a social agency that delivered impressive-looking numbers. Reach up 300%. Impressions through the roof. But when you dig into the business outcomes — bookings, foot traffic, enquiries, repeat customers — nothing moved. Sometimes things got worse, because the content that inflated those top-line numbers was so far removed from the brand's actual identity that it confused the very people who might have become customers.
Optimising for reach is like optimising for the number of people who glance at your shopfront while walking past. It's not meaningless, but if none of them walk in, what exactly have you achieved?
The Rise of Algorithm-Bait
The algorithm obsession has spawned an entire genre of content I call algorithm-bait. You'll recognise the patterns:
- Engagement farming. "Tag someone who needs to see this!" or "Comment YES if you agree!" — hollow calls to action designed to juice engagement metrics without creating any genuine connection.
- Ragebait. Deliberately provocative takes designed to generate angry comments and heated debates. The algorithm reads conflict as engagement. Your brand gets exposure. But what kind of exposure? The kind that makes thoughtful people unfollow you.
- Trend-chasing. Jumping on every trending audio, meme format, or cultural moment regardless of whether it has anything to do with your brand. A luxury hotel doing a lip-sync trend. A law firm posting a "get ready with me." The dissonance is palpable.
- Bait-and-switch hooks. "I can't believe I'm sharing this..." followed by something entirely unremarkable. It works once. Then your audience learns not to trust you.
Here's what every brand running this playbook fails to grasp: attention is not the same as trust. You can capture someone's attention with a cheap trick. But trust is built through consistency, authenticity, and the repeated experience of a brand that delivers what it promises. Algorithm-bait erodes trust with every post. It trains your audience to expect manipulation rather than value. And once trust is gone, no amount of reach will bring it back.
What "Posting for People" Actually Means
Posting for people is not a vague platitude about "being authentic." It's a concrete strategic shift that changes how you plan, create, and evaluate content. Here's what it looks like in practice:
Start with the question: "Would a real person want to see this?" Not "will the algorithm push this?" Not "does this tick the SEO box?" Would an actual human being — someone with limited time, infinite options, and a finely tuned bullshit detector — choose to spend three seconds of their life on this piece of content? If the honest answer is no, don't post it. Post nothing instead. Nothing is better than noise.
Optimise for emotional resonance, not algorithmic signals. The content that performs best over time isn't the content that games engagement mechanics. It's the content that makes someone feel something — recognised, inspired, entertained, understood. Emotional resonance creates the kind of engagement that algorithms eventually reward anyway: saves, shares, DMs, return visits. The algorithm follows human behaviour. Not the other way around.
Let your brand have a genuine point of view. The safest content strategy is also the most forgettable one. Brands that try to appeal to everyone end up resonating with no one. The brands our team has seen build the most loyal communities are the ones willing to have an opinion, take a stance, and accept that not everyone will agree. That's not recklessness. That's clarity.
The algorithm is a mirror. It reflects what people respond to. So the best algorithm strategy has always been the simplest one: make something worth responding to.
Quality Over Frequency, Every Time
One of the most damaging myths in social media marketing is that you need to post constantly to stay relevant. The "post every day" mantra has created an ocean of mediocre content from brands that simply don't have enough to say to justify daily publishing.
At Cohen Media House, we've moved nearly all of our clients away from high-frequency posting schedules. For most brands, three to four genuinely excellent posts per week will outperform seven forgettable ones. Every single time. The maths isn't complicated: one post that gets saved, shared, and talked about is worth more than five posts that get scrolled past in half a second.
This also solves the burnout problem that plagues every social media manager on the planet. When you're not scrambling to fill a content calendar with daily posts, you have the breathing room to actually think about what you're making. Creativity requires space. The constant pressure to produce destroys the conditions that produce good work.
The Value of Imperfect Content
Something we've noticed consistently across our client accounts: the posts that generate the deepest engagement are rarely the most polished ones. A behind-the-scenes iPhone video of a chef testing a new dish at midnight. A candid photo from a photoshoot that didn't make the final cut. A founder talking directly to camera without a script, slightly nervous, completely genuine.
Imperfection signals humanity. In a feed full of professionally colour-graded, meticulously art-directed content, something raw and unfiltered stops the scroll precisely because it doesn't look like marketing. It looks like a real person sharing a real moment. And that's what people actually want from social media — even from brands.
This doesn't mean abandoning quality. It means expanding your definition of quality to include emotional honesty alongside production value. The most compelling brand feeds we manage blend both: high-production hero content sitting alongside raw, intimate moments. The combination builds a brand that feels both aspirational and accessible.
Build Community, Not Audience
There's a critical distinction that separates the brands winning on social media from those just surviving on it. Winning brands don't think about building an audience. They think about building a community.
An audience watches. A community participates. An audience is a number on a dashboard. A community is a group of people who feel a sense of belonging and ownership in what you're creating. An audience can be bought with ad spend. A community can only be earned through genuine, sustained engagement.
Building community means responding to every comment like it matters — because it does. It means featuring your customers and followers in your content. It means asking real questions and actually incorporating the answers. It means creating content that invites participation rather than passive consumption. It means treating your social channels less like a billboard and more like a dinner party where everyone at the table has something to contribute.
We've seen this approach transform outcomes for our clients. When a boutique hotel we work with shifted from broadcasting polished marketing content to actively building a community of past and future guests, their direct bookings from social channels increased by over 40% in six months. Not because the algorithm changed. Because people started caring.
The Long Game Always Wins
I understand the temptation to chase short-term metrics. Clients want results. Budgets need justification. And a post that goes viral tomorrow is more viscerally satisfying than a community that grows steadily over eighteen months. But social media has been around long enough now that we have the data, and the data is unambiguous: brands that play the long game — prioritising trust, consistency, and genuine human connection over algorithmic tricks — outperform the hackers and the shortcut-takers every single time.
The algorithm will change. It changes constantly. The platforms will shift. New ones will emerge, old ones will fade. But the fundamental thing that makes someone stop scrolling, pay attention, and eventually become a customer will never change: the feeling that a brand understands them, respects their intelligence, and has something genuinely valuable to offer.
Stop posting for the algorithm. Start posting for the person on the other side of the screen. That's always been the strategy. Everything else is just noise.