Struggling with Social Engagement? The 2025 Algorithm Change Might Be the Culprit—Here’s What You Need to Know!

One of the biggest algorithm changes that occurred in 2024 and that will continue to change the way we use social in 2025 is the deprioritization of follower content. 

Over the last ten years, your social “value” was largely determined by your follower or subscriber count. People would follow you on social (or subscribe to your channel on Youtube) if they enjoyed your content or found it useful or informative.

Why? Because they wanted to see more of the content they enjoyed. This worked for consumers because their feeds were then curated based on their own preferences; essentially, they had “opted-in” to seeing the content they were being served. Likewise, this worked for content creators because anything they created would be guaranteed to be seen by their followers as they posted. Makes sense right?

Enter 2024’s Q4 algorithm change and that logic’s gone with the wind! Now, on average, less than 10% of your followers and friends will see the content you post. That can drop to as low as 1% based on the format you're posting in. This is a huge slap in the face to creators, brands and personalities who have spent years and countless hours of effort ideating, filming and producing amazing content. Creators can no longer rely on monetizing solely via their social accounts; they now need to look for ways to diversify that income. This change is also frustrating for social media users who follow accounts in order to get more exposure to future content because that’s simply not going to happen anymore.

In addition to deprioritizing follower accounts, the algorithm is also deprioritizing business accounts. Not great news for all of us who run small businesses wanting to organically attract potential leads and clients - looks like more ad dollars for big tech in 2025 - yay! 

As recently as a year ago, followers still had some marketing “worth”. You could post on your account with certainty that a large percentage of your fans would be exposed to, and subsequently engage with your content. Today, followers and subscribers are little more than a vanity metric. 

What do I mean by vanity metric? It’s a metric that “looks good”, it’s a “nice to have”. At face value, it’s a win, but when it comes to driving results it’s now relatively useless. 

The one remaining benefit to a large follower count is social proof. Humans are like sheep, they like to follow what they think other people like (or what is popular). So if someone sees two accounts with identical content; one that’s being followed by 200 people and one that’s being followed by 300,000 people, they’re more likely to follow the masses and assume the 300k-follower account is more valuable. 

So you’re probably wondering, if this change is frustrating for both social media creators and users, why was it introduced? It really plays into the Tik Tok effect. It’s in the social media platforms’ best interests to keep users' attention and time on their platform(s) as long as possible (and to steal/win it from other platforms, which in turn makes the algorithms more competitive). We all have limited attention spans and limited time in our days. By prioritizing the most viral and addictive (sometimes unhealthy) content, they can hold our attention as long as possible. To be able to recommend whatever is trending, they need to deprioritize all other content and so this is the vicious cycle that keeps us locked in a doom-scroll when we should be reading a book, playing with the kids or going for a walk in nature. 

You might be asking, why do they want to hold our attention? The simple answer is: the longer we spend on their platform, the more ads we’ll be exposed to and ads = money. Money always wins with big business.

Until recently, it seemed like there was a nice balancing act going on between the networks’ organic algorithms and the ever-present push to make more revenue, but with all the enforced changes you’ve got to wonder if our frustrations as users will soon override our addictions, actually culminating in the opposite outcome: a decrease in attention and time-spent or an abandonment of the platforms altogether. 

So if your strategy for high-frequency organic posting isn't the way to attain growth & engagement anymore, what should you focus on? It really comes down to quality over quantity. This has always been the case, but frequency of posting and flooding your feed is now less important than ever. If only 1% of people are going to view your content, then make sure they cannot ignore it! Pack your content full of value. 

It also goes without saying (but I'm going to say it anyway) that to compensate for lost organic reach you're probably going to want to run ads to buy it back. I'm usually not a fan of boosting a post, BUT if you have a post that has achieved great organic engagement, put some boost dollars behind it to push it further. Optimize to profile visits to drive more eyeballs to the other content on your feed. 

If you're familiar with Ads Manager, I recommend implementing a strategic ads funnel approach for conversion-led goals like leads and sales to make up for organic conversions you may have seen in the past.

To end on a positive note, if you hate creating and posting organic content you can rest assured in the knowledge that you really won’t have to do as much of it this year as it’s probably not going to work for you anyway….

unless you're in the 0.001% of people who go viral…. that’s always the exception to the rule!

For help with paid ad strategy, book a call with our team or try our DIY Ads Course.