Social Media Does In My Brain
But I did a 35 day strategic campaign and here is what I learnt....
Social media does my head in - and it seems I am not alone in this. But there is no denying that if you are a micro business owner social media has the potential to drive traffic to your product or service, and that this is not to be sniffed at.
When I started posting on Instagram in earnest about 8 years ago, I had missed the giddy days of huge followings with little effort, the days before common usage of the term ‘you have to work the algorithm’, where it seems you could just have fun sharing what you did and you would be rewarded with an engaged and ever growing audience.
This has been far from my experience.
For the last year particularly I have found myself (and for reference I am talking mainly about Instagram here) stuck on the same 3 thousand and something followers - my numbers go up, my numbers go down, they go back up and yep, they go back down again.
I’ve been aware for some time now of the 1% call to action conversion, which in my experience has been pretty much spot on - meaning that if you ask your social media following to follow a link, sign up for something, buy a product, you can count on around 1% of your total following actually doing it. Add to this the fact that publishers, shops and various other bodies you may want to invest in/support/stock your work will very often be influenced in their decision whether or not to by how many followers you have, it makes sense for this to be something to spend some amount of time on…
And so, at the beginning of March I embarked on a planned 35 day social media strategy - 35 Condiments in 35 Days, which involved a commitment to sharing a recipe for a different condiment each day on Instagram and Facebook.
If I knew then what I know now! To save you some potential pain, here are some of my findings and conclusions.
My reasons for embarking on this endurance campaign were threefold, I will summarise at the end how successful this was.
I wanted to see if a planned strategy with multiple postings and a lot of reels would increase engagement on Instagram. I had been having a really frustrating time of feeling invisible with numbers of followers and views not shifting.
I wanted to see if I could drive engagement over to Substack, Pinterest & ultimately my website.
I wanted to run a campaign that would publicise the relaunch of my Spice Blends, Dukkahs & Salts online.
Social media is like the worst aspects of the school playground. As with playtime, I love the creative bit, the making pretty pictures & films, chatting with mates, sharing funny or beautiful or political stuff. But I am always mindful not to care too much. Don’t look like you try too hard, don’t speak out of turn or draw too much attention to yourself because people are not going to like that and it can be brutal. It is also painfully exposing like the playground could be. Wear a new pair of shoes, shout a little too loudly and - yes I know this is revealing a lot about my childhood, but I hope you get the analogy - social media can be a hard, exposing and intimidating space to occupy.
There are some people who are so creative and whose work and presence on social media is so unique that they will gain attention just for existing, although this is much less the case now than it used to be. If you make food like me, or any other product or service that there are a billion others doing similar manifestations of, it’s close to impossible to become a big hitter on social media without a lot of hard graft. Gaining traction takes a lot of work.
I will say here and now that there is no law that says you MUST work social media hard and that you MUST focus on stats and driving your accounts up the algorithm. It’s completely 100% ok to noodle about, of course it is. The following is for people who want or need to work social media for financial gains, to grow their businesses, to drive traffic to their product or service.
The content below is based on Instagram - much is relevant to Facebook too, but Instagram is where I focus my efforts (I have a Facebook page that all my instagram posts go to that is ‘healthy’ according to Meta and I do engage with followers on there, but I have less of a grasp on the ins and outs of how best to work it as a platform).
So here we go, a deep dive into all I have gleaned over the last month of working Instagram hard, like I have never worked it before (and hope never to work it again!)
Point 1: Social Media - The Clue Is In The Name
I have long grasped the concept that one key to social media is in the name ‘social’ media, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people simply haven’t got that yet. As if somehow, simply being there & sharing content should be enough. A bit like a coke head at a party. These are platforms built for interaction. If you aren’t engaging you aren’t going to get any engagement - neither do you deserve any in my honest opinion. Yes I know that some people are shy & struggle with putting themselves out there, in which case I would say find another means to promote your business as you will never be happy on social media or pay someone to run it for you, if you can. The accounts that drive me mad are those who are too cool to try too hard, or to be seen to try too hard - with that sort of attitude you cannot expect to thrive. Apart from anything else it’s just plain rude not to reply to people when they talk to you, to enjoy their output and to never once actually tell them so beyond clicking the occasional ‘like’. So first step, if you aren’t already, is get on there and engage. Chat with people, share their posts to your stories, send their posts to your friends. Save the posts that you would like to refer to again. And for heavens sake reply to people who take the trouble to comment on your posts! Yes, this can be daunting, tiring, a bit boring, but suck it up. I have a rule, self imposed, that I reply in like form. So if a comment is simply emojis, I reply in emojis. If it is brief, my reply is brief. If it is long & heartfelt I do my best to mirror that in my response.
Point 2 : High Follower Numbers Does Not Necessarily Equal Good Engagement
There may be some of you reading the previous point thinking “well so and so has 90k followers and doesn’t engage”. Yes, there are accounts like this, but if you look at the engagement figures on their posts I can pretty much guarantee that they will be low, considering the number of followers they have. Social media is full of robot accounts - if you ever (and please don’t ever) pay for followers you will end up with majority bots meaning little to no meaningful engagement. Checking out the stats on other peoples accounts is an interesting exercise that I highly recommend. The easiest way to do this is to go to the reels tab on a profile and you will see the number of views had in the bottom left corner of each reel. When I share a reel I hope for 20% engagement and higher, so with a bit under 4k followers, that’s around 4-800 views. Look on an account with 40k followers and check their reel stats, if they are sat at around the 3-4k mark this represents low engagement relative to their number of followers, being around 10%. So remember to look at your statistics in relation to each other. Number watching is not good for your mental health (spoken from experience) but if you are going to obsess over figures don’t let it be follower numbers, let it be on post engagement and follow through to website visits.
Point 3 : How, What & When To Post
First off, use your dashboard. If you don’t have a business account, get one. With a business account you can view your statistics & this is really helpful. I learnt via my dashboard that my best engagement time is around 6am - I also learnt that most of my followers are women of my sort of age so it figures that we’re all up early thanks to our hormones… Since starting my 35 Days of Condiments recipe shares I have been posting 2-3 times a day with constant stories (more on these below). I try to vary the content so one reel (short video), one carousel (more than 1 photo in a post) and one static post (old school single image) a day. Carousels are good because if people only see one picture in the selection while scrolling through their feed, they will be shown the post again and again until they have seen them all, so it keeps your post live for longer. Instagram is very keen on reels and is likely to show your reel posts to more people than it might other formats. Equally the more reels you make the more they will be seen. This is an algorithm thing, more below. It is also advisable to do a live at least once a week, if you can bear it! Basically the more of the stuff Instagram gives us to play with that we use, the more favourable they are to our posts. If you only ever post static pictures and occasional stories, you are not likely to see much increase in engagement or follower numbers because the algorithm simply wont see you.
Point 4 : Reels - How To Avoid A Nervous Breakdown
Making reels is hard. Anyone who tells you different is lying. The tools Instagram offers are getting better all the time and I do pretty much all of my video editing in the Instagram app where I used to edit in VSCO before. The best thing to do is just to use the reels tool, play around with it - this is my experience and I know that we all learn differently - there are a lot of video tutorials out there. I really like the free support offered by Hootsuite and have learnt a lot from their articles and videos. If you have never made a reel before do not expect to be able to just jump on the platform and make one - if only it were that simple!
Here are my top tips for making reels:
When filming for reels, less is more, do not give yourself more editing than you need to by filming great long sections. Remember reels are really short.
Reels used only to be 90 seconds long. They have just increased this to 3 minutes BUT music licensing is still only for 90 second excerpts AND you cannot boost a reel that is longer than 90 seconds. I have stuck to 90 second reels for both of these reasons.
You also cannot boost a reel that uses licensed music. If you have been following my Condiments shares you may have noticed that I have stopped adding music most often, this is why. More on boosting below.
ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS save a draft of your reel before posting it. Just get in the habit of saving your reels to drafts as you are making them. Shit happens, the doorbell rings, you wander off, the app closes/refreshes/crashes - your reel is gone. This is agonising, believe me. Always save your reels to drafts!
ALWAYS write your caption in notes or copy it before posting for the same reason. I do this with all my posts, not just reels.
If you are going to share a regular thing via reels, like I have been sharing recipes, then design a format and stick to it. People like the familiar, they like to know what to expect. If your reels get low views and engagement then maybe the format needs some work…
Make reels that you enjoy making. Don’t make it too hard. Don’t do it if it’s not fun - chances are no one else will like it either.
Watch other peoples reels. If you work in a particular niche watch the reels of other people in that niche for inspiration. Think about what it is you like about certain reels, emulate that. When I considered my format I knew that clarity was important, this led me to starting most reels with bowls of ingredients in a flat lay, filmed from above with me pointing at them. This also helps me a lot when recording the voiceover.
Get a tripod. If you make more than one reel you will not regret getting a tripod. I got this one, it’s not cheap but I have made so many reels since getting it, which I wouldn’t have done without it. So if you are committed to making reels, get a tripod.
Always use natural light. This goes for static photos too. I use VSCO, a photo editing app to improve exposure and lighting if I need to, rather than using artificial light. I do also have a natural light ring like this one, which is helpful if natural light is really poor.
If adding a voice over description or if there is talking in your reel always add captions. This is for 2 reasons - 1 it’s more inclusive, there are a lot of deaf and hearing impaired people on Instagram. 2 lots of people scroll through their feed with the sound off and you will miss them if you have no captions.
Captions generated by Instagram are pretty awful and will often spell things incorrectly. I have received a few compliments from people for my voiceovers on reels, which always makes me laugh because my main focus is enunciating really clearly so that I don’t have to edit the captions! Editing captions is hell! It’s really fiddly, you get one chance to do all the editing per try (infinite tries) and it’s really easy to accidentally step out of editing and then you have to start all over again.
Point 4 : The Goddamn Algorithm
In all truth I cannot tell you with any kind of authority what it is or how it works. These are my observations:
The more you post, chat, comment on others posts, engage across the platform using all the formats offered to you the more visible you become to the algorithm.
If you do little to none of these things, the algorithm isn’t going to know you exist and is going to assume that all your content is shit and that nobody wants to see it. So it won’t bother showing it to anyone.
The more interaction and engagement you generate the noisier you are and the more attractive you will become to the algorithm. Have you noticed people asking for comments? I’ve done this, did it today in fact, rather than simply directing people to the inevitable ‘link in bio’ I invited people to comment ‘yes please’ and then I would DM them the link. This just pushes up your engagement stats and makes you again, more visible and therefore attractive to the algorithm.
Get eyes on what you do, get those eyes to prove they have been there by liking, commenting, sharing, saving your posts - this will all make you more visible to the algorithm meaning you will be shared more widely as a consequence. And this works both ways. The more you actively engage with other peoples posts the more visible you become to the algorithm - it is not enough to only engage with the engagement on your own posts, you have to get out there and socialise.
Point 5 : Boosting Posts
Is it worth it? Is it necessary? Is it all a con?
Yes, yes and sort of yes again.
Boosting posts will definitely get you more attention from the algorithm and therefore boost your numbers, and it is definitely something that Instagram wants us all to do more of, so I guess it is going to be increasingly the case.
BUT boosting alone is not enough and I wouldn’t necessarily advise it if your engagement and follower statistics are low. Based on my experience over this last month I would say plan a strategy, increase your interaction, start posting 2-3 times a day for a good 2-3 weeks and then start boosting posts.
Before doing this 35 Day challenge I would occasionally boost posts and yes, they would get me a few more followers but then as soon as the post was no longer boosted nothing - it would all die off.
Around day 22 of the challenge was when I started to see a healthy upturn in statistics, which directly followed what I had expected based on the research I had done. I boosted 2 posts over the last weekend for about 36 hours each and gained over 100 followers every 12 hours, roughly speaking. This is like nothing I have ever experienced before. I have stuck at around the 3k followers mark for at least 2 years but since beginning my campaign I have steadily gained more, as I write my followers on Instagram stand at 4,045 - my hope at the beginning of March was to hit 4k by the end of the month and I am happy to have achieved this. BUT my general engagement has not massively increased, on analysis it has only gone up in direct proportion to the number of followers I have, meaning I get about a 1-2% ‘like’ and ‘comments’ engagement on posts and a 20-40% view on reels, based on follower numbers. This is frustrating.
It is not worth boosting posts other than reels in my opinion. This is because all other posts when boosted only get the option to have ‘visit website’ as the call to action (boosted posts get a button for viewers to press). When you boost a reel you get 3 call to action choices: visit website, visit profile, message you. Instagram doesn’t like sending people off the platform, engagement on boosted reels with visit profile buttons have had much higher numbers than any of the visit website buttons I’ve used.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money on boosting posts to see results. I always opt to boost the ad till I choose to pause it, rather than boosting for a set number of days, and I have never spent more than around £8 a day. When my cashflow improves I plan to experiment with this. But the 2 adds I boosted for about 36 hours that gained me roughly 300+ followers cost me in total about £27. You can see in the analytics, it breaks down the fee charged in terms of the benefits gained, which is helpful.
Summary
As stated at the beginning, I embarked on this 35 day challenge on Instagram for very specific reasons:
I wanted to see if a planned strategy with multiple postings and a lot of reels would increase engagement on Instagram. And it did, I hit my target of reaching 4k followers. Engagement with reels is good, but static posts, unless they feature pictures of me or the dog, do not get many likes. A static picture of some food will gain as few as 12 likes up to maybe 50+ on a good day. A picture of me or the dog can get over 200 likes - I don’t know if this is my audience or Instagram causing this to be the case.
I wanted to see if I could drive engagement over to Substack, Pinterest & ultimately my website. My aim was to gain 200 subscribers on Substack with some paid ones too. I exceeded this, which I am really happy about. Website visits increased well too. Pinterest remains a work in progress and warrants a whole post for itself, which I will share just as soon as I understand what the hell it’s all about! I am pinning daily and implementing strategies that I have found online and I have gone from 43 monthly views to 2.8k in just over 2 weeks.
I wanted to run a campaign that would publicise the relaunch of my Spice Blends, Dukkahs & Salts online. The success of this has been mixed. After I posted that orders are live on my Spice Blends I gained a lot of website visits but they had a very low conversion to sales. These are hard times and so I think there are a number of reasons why this is the case.
And so I will continue to be present on Instagram but my main focus for now is Pinterest, in terms of driving traffic to my products and services. I want Instagram to be fun again. I want to step away from my frustrations and bitterness towards the platform, spend more time intentionally seeking friends and allies posts so that I naturally see more of them, and helping them by actively engaging with their content while simultaneously boosting my own visibility. This strategy was one of the last that I employed and it definitely has a strong impact on follower numbers.
In short my new strategy for social media is to post once or twice a day, use a variety of formats, always have stories (‘stories are for followers, posts are for new people’ was a helpful tip I picked up meaning you can be more familiar and intimate with stories as only your followers will see them) and spend half an hour a day being social on my socials! Liking, saving, commenting and sharing other peoples posts.
Wonder where I will be in a month?
I cannot believe the amount of work…mind boggling. I’m no longer a business account (long since) but stand in awe at what you have learned and now shared?!!
Separate point but salts and spices…I keep seeing a reference to them but not seen a post about what they are? Or…why I need them if that makes sense?
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God, the caption editing on Instagram reels drives me mad! If you make one other edit it reverts back to whatever it heard and you have to do the whole thing again. Sometimes it's possible to miss it's done this until after you've published. You think with all their money and that TikTok have worked it out, Meta would be able to!
Congratulations on this commitment and hard work! I can't wait to hear about Pinterest!