All Hail the Algorithm
Did 31 Days of Posting Make an Impact?
If you’ve been following me on the social medias for any amount of time you might have noticed that I don’t post a lot.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter….I’ll like, I’ll retweet, or share in my Instastory, but when it comes to my own regular posting I typically keep it to once a week to hype up a blog post or throw in an occasional personal pic when the mood strikes.
But I started wondering if there really was something to this algorithm issue influencers and artists always complain about. Would posting every day help my feed, and therefore my writing, reach a wider audience? I wanted to see if more consistent posting really does all the things influencers and social media experts claim it does. If I posted every day for an entire month, would I see more engagement, more link clicks, more followers? Could I even actually pinpoint the types of posts my audience responded best to?
So for the month of October I quietly went about posting every day for 31 days (give or take a day or two.) Luckily, since it was the spookiest month of the year, I had more things to share than I normally would. For this experiment, I stuck to doing my daily posting on Instagram and left Facebook and Twitter to their lowly place as once a week posts.
After a month of posting here are October’s Instagram stats compared to September:
134% increase on accounts reached
170% increase in accounts engaged with
418% increase in content interactions
516% increase in post interactions
An overall growth of 8 followers
Just going by the numbers, it’s obvious that more eyes saw my posts in October versus September, but I’m not sure that’s really all that impressive when you consider the fact that I only posted 4 times on my grid in September.
But even though I had such an increase in, well, everything Instagram insights measure, when I looked at the actual likes I got on my 30 posts of October, I realized I barely averaged 13 likes per post. Sure, a couple of posts have a lot more (selfies, reading round ups, and things I bought from small artists) but a few posts have a lot less (most blog related posts.) By comparison, the average likes per post on the 30 Instagram posts I had made before this experiment (from September 30th back to April 11th) came out to 18 likes.
So I don’t know if you can say that the consistent daily posting is the thing that really drove people to my profile so much as posting the right thing at the right time on the right day with the right hashtags. It’s like you have to perform magic to make the stars align in the perfect way that will get an audience to your content.
After a month of daily posting the questions remains: are these numbers showing enough of a positive impact on my profile or blog to make me change my ways and start posting more consistently across my social media platforms? Probably not.
See, after doing so for a month I was reminded that I actually really hate posting every day. Figuring out what to post is a nightmare and I don’t really care about the way my grid looks or want to trap myself into only posting certain things at certain times just because it’s more aesthetically pleasing to my potential followers. Maybe this is a hindrance to my general online growth but I’d rather post what I want and create a space I’m happy with than something I’ve orchestrated in the hopes of becoming more popular online.
Of course, and obviously, at the end of the day likes don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to self worth or validation, but in terms of this experiment…it’s obvious that when I only posted 4-10 times at month I was able to garner more likes and more eyes than when I was posting every single day. Personally, I think that’s because when I post more sparingly I’m putting more thought into those posts that I want to share as opposed to when I was just trying to fill a quota of posts.
While October 2021 was my best traffic month I’ve had in the almost two years I’ve been running this blog it appears that has just about nothing to do with the links I have all over my social media accounts and everything to do with the hundreds of people who found my site while searching for spells and rituals to try out for Samhain (thanks Google and SEO!)
Moving forward, I don’t think I have any intention of being a star social media influencer and posting constantly. I don’t have the patience, the money, or the time to devote to crafting the perfect social media package that will draw people to me and in turn my writing. Instead, I want to focus on the things that I like posting, that I feel passionate talking about, and that I enjoy. If I’m going to find the right audience, I can only do that by authentically acting like myself and not by pretending to care about things I don’t (like creating the perfect social media persona.)
Social media has really become a necessary evil for a lot of people and small businesses. While many of us hate having to post to keep the almighty algorithm happy, a lot of smaller artists don’t have much of a choice if they want people to see and purchase their work. I’m sure there are plenty of people who enjoy posting daily in an effort to grow their brand but I hope more than anything we can figure out a better way to get ourselves and our work out there so we no longer have to be cultists of the algorithm.
Does social media play a big part in your lif? Do you use it to promote your work such as writing, art, music, photography etc.? How do you feel about the role social media currently plays in small businesses and arts when it comes to finding clients, customers, and an audience? Let me know in the comments below!