What I learned posting on Instagram 28 days in a row
An experiment in becoming more visible & the power of sharing expertise online. Death of the pixel and paid media? Help me make an awesome marketing course.
My relationship with Instagram (for work) over the years has been sporadic to say the least.
During my stint of freelancing 2015 - 2019 I had <500 followers on my work Instagram profile @bethbycontent. Yet even with a relatively small number, it became a source of leads - and fairly lucrative ones at that. Bringing in anything from £5k - £20k of work per year.
Yet I constantly struggled to know what to post. I often had stuff to say, but felt like my photo-taking skills held me back in the era of the perfectly poised grid.
Enter Instagram stories and I, like many I’m sure, felt like I could post more often, more casually and not worry that I couldn’t create the perfect flat lay!
Soon, Instagram became my source of not just leads, but of community.
A place to have virtual “colleagues” to discuss ideas with, get recommendations and even have the odd non-judgmental rant 😬
In terms of content, I started running “the Friday Five” which shared (via Stories) five interesting developments in social media or marketing.
This did well and I grew to about 800 followers, where I remained for the next few years.
At the start of this year, after a Christmas of isolating, I decided I wanted to challenge myself. To post consistently for 28 days, with SEO tips. This was for a few reasons:
Since doubling down on SEO I realised that it’s a marketing area where so much still feels confusing, and where a lot of the advice online assumes you have a lot of SEO knowledge, or is very outdated
I wanted a bit of accountability to engage more with an Instagram community that I knew I enjoyed being around, and that held value
One of my aims for 2022 is to build visibility and I had an expectation that sharing knowledge would help me to (hopefully) reach new accounts
And do you know what folks? I did it.
I managed to post 28 consecutive tips on SEO to Instagram.
The good -
I was surprised at the amount this helped to grow my account. Over the 28 days I gained about 200 new followers. This was mainly thanks to my existing followers re-sharing the tips, or shouting out the series to their own communities and newsletters.
The bad (?) -
What surprised me most was what happened to engagement over this time. Something we put a lot of onus on when it comes to Instagram is “likes” and “views”. Over the course of the weeks, my engagement dropped a lot.
“Likes” on the posts went from 40-70, to 10-30.
This happened even when my “accounts reached” remained stable. Which suggested that similar numbers were seeing my posts, they just were engaging less.
And while my vanity engagement dropped, the amount of responses I got remained fairly consistent. I had DMs from people thanking me for the content. Clients mentioned some of the tips I’d shared on calls, or sent them to their teams.
As a marketer, I know not to rely heavily on vanity metrics like likes and impressions, but this was a good reminder. That thanks to the way we use social today, just because people aren’t liking our content doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging with it.
The surprising -
I also learned that those using Instagram are not just there to scroll mindlessly, but to expand their knowledge and take away value that they can use in their life or business.
It’s why there are so many sub communities, like the ones around personal investment, or up-skilling. It seems we aren’t just there to sell ourselves, but to also learn and grow by following experts.
This was my main takeaway. That the more knowledge I can share, the more “successful” I’ll find my content.
Will I run something similar again? Probably not. Like all Instagram formats, I imagine we’ll start to see more accounts jump on this trend of text-based, tip sharing content which will quickly reduce impact.
So for now, it’s back to the drawing board to see where my Insta journey will take me next. But one thing’s for sure, I know that sharing knowledge works. That the Instagram community is interested in content that does more than just look good - that provides value, and helps them to learn.
Which is why I’ll be focusing on new ways to do exactly that.
Have you tried an Instagram experiment like this one? If so, I’d love to hear how you found it!
Yours,
Beth
A quick ask…. 🙏
I often create courses and programs for clients and one of my aims this year is to create one of my own! I’m currently in the ideation stage and am trying to work out what would be most valuable to create.
So if you are:
Someone who invests in courses / learning for yourself
And either a freelancer, someone who works in marketing, or a business owner
I’d love if you could answer this short and anonymous survey.
Thank you!!
Death of the marketing pixel
If you track the efforts of things like Google Ads or Facebook Ads it’s highly likely you rely on marketing “pixels”. Whether you set these up yourself, or a marketer/developer did it for you, they’re the main mechanism used to track results across apps or platforms.
As you may have heard, Apple has already implemented an option to reject cross-app tracking in iOS 14, as well as on macOS Big Sur and Google appears to be following suit on Android (although to a lesser extent).
This means for us as consumers, that you can stop apps from tracking your behaviour, so that the products you just viewed on ASOS don’t suddenly appear on Facebook. As marketers, this makes our ability to share personalised ads to the audiences that they’re most relevant to, more difficult. Ultimately, we’ll need to spend more on ads for less impact and sales, as we can’t specify who we want to target.
So should we be worried?
This isn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last, time the marketing landscape shifts beneath us. I think marketers are generally pretty good at adapting and when this happens, I always return to asking myself these basic questions to pick up the slack:
How are we communicating with existing customers to encourage re-purchasing and expansion? (Rather than always focusing on the new)
What brand activities are we doing so that people hear our name regularly? (To help make up for loss of remarketing ability)
How can we position ourselves where our ideal customers are already looking? (Organic search, social search, WoM, newsletters, events, podcasts etc. that don’t rely on basic paid advertising)
Interesting reads
Do you suffer from “meeting bloat”? This is something I’m very conscious of as I know that too many virtual meetings drain my energy & mean an unproductive week
Something I’ve always recommended is leaving any employer on good terms - when I first went freelance most of my work came from past employers or people they recommended me to! So this is a good short guide on how to resign graciously
Why brands are taking influencers in-house - something I think we’ll see a lot more of in 2022
This came out in January, but I really enjoyed the High Performance podcast episode with Vicky Pattison on how she rewrote perception following her rise to fame
About me…
Hi, I’m Beth! I’ve spent my career building marketing strategies & managing marketing teams, mainly in the B2B technology space. Today, I’m a self-employed SEO & content expert working with fast-growth SaaS companies.
I’m also incredibly passionate about mentorship, helping business owners to learn the fundamentals of marketing and building a business for time and financial freedom!
The unofficial mentor newsletter shares thoughts and tips on doing exactly that.
To discuss anything you read here (or just life generally!) I’d love to connect more on:
Services that I offer can be found on: