My Social Media Experiment (It's a Dozy)

If you are like me, this hobby of creating bookish content has become a guessing game of how to stay ahead of the algorithm. Even with the most optimism it's hard to look at the time spent on posts and have it "flop".  Because I'm a nerd at heart, instead of beating myself up I Googled everything to situate my content in the best light. I looked at color theory and current social media recommendations to make sure I wasn't getting lost in the sea of content. What I quickly learned is that the recommendations are conflicting. GO FIGURE!!!! But, it gave me something to work with instead of guessing, which I was mostly doing up until now. 

Let me first start by pointing out each platform has a post lifecycle- Facebook ≅6 hours, Instagram ≅48 hours, and Twitter ≅18 minutes (NeoReach, 2021). Essentially, this range is the approximate time you have to connect with your audience before your post is lost in the ether 👀

Now, I think at face value, the lifecycle range is disheartening, BUT if you get to the right people then the next natural step is engagement. So the first battle, I think is to get in front of your audience and then go from there. After I took a deep breath, I started to think what is important to me because I'm only one person trying to manage this hobby. 

I want to preface this by saying I have a small platform and our goals could be different. My goal is not growth but rather to increase engagement (these two things aren't mutually exclusive but a key point particular to how I will present the information below). What I found was counterintuitive but the numbers are telling me an interesting story. Ok, so here's what I did and learned from May-July based on the platforms I that I post/use for my bookish content Twitter, Instagram, and Blogger. *I left out Facebook because I don't have the same impact.*

One more thing- 😄 I can hear every teacher from my past screaming at me "SHOW YOUR WORK", so in full transparency I used the Twitter and Blogger analytics to look at fluctuations, but with IG I manually inputted the numbers because there were so many variables to keep track of 😬. 

• On the desktop version of IG you can download your data (Settings > Privacy Settings > Data Download > Request Data). I tried downloading the files to my desktop but couldn't get the zip file to open but there is an opportunity to download if you can get it to work. 

My spreadsheet is basic and used averages, data bars, and pivot tables w/slicers, my goal wasKIS-keep it simple this go round. I also scoured the interwebs for strategies to optimize social media. There was lots of paid classes 🙄(from the preview it was common sense stuff) so anything free I used. I've denoted advice throughout this post as Influencer Advice. 

• Just in case you want to take a look at your numbers, you can copy my basic bare bones spreadsheet. 
• For an intermediate report template Smartsheets has free templates. I downloaded the Social Media Report Template, but the Social Media Effectiveness Tracker might also be a helpful pre-made spreadsheet. 
• For more advanced metrics with dashboards ExcelTable has a free template that you can input your data. A more advanced spreadsheet I think makes sense if your account is monetized or it's a business. 

Here we go, Twitter first...

What I'm about to share was weird part of this experiment, but I started tweeting less between May-July and as you can see from July's analytics my engagement went up. 😟 It doesn't make sense, but I think what happened here is when I DID tweet it got to my mutuals. It's painful to see, but in every case it worked to my benefit to engage strategically on Twitter which resulted in a net increase across the board.  *Cough* while I wasn't tweeting, I was lurking and liking 😁 so I was still 'active'. 

Now, I'm not suggesting anyone tweet less, but rather tweet strategically. These numbers are a reduction by about 45% in posts and I tweeted mostly around 10:00 am or 6:00 pm EST. From what I can tell (based on the tweets/threads with the most engagement) I was responding to a tweet/thread up to 3 days after the original post. This felt like a better use of my time than jumping in a lot of conversations that I may or may not care about. Though, I want to keep an eye if this will continue to hold true, especially since not saying my 2cents might be hard long term. 

As a side note my Twitter Follower Growth Rate is 2% which did not decrease during this time. 

Follower Growth Rate is calculated by # of followers / # of new followers * 100

I think what's also really key here is that this approach does not align with Influencer Advice that Twitter's drives on negativity. The tweets that had the most engagement were related to The Bear, advice on supporting bookish creators, and asking for book recommendations. Friends, this realization is a good thing for me because that's why I started the account in the first place. 

Now for the chaos Instagram, buckle up because it's going to be a lot😓...

This portion of the experiment was a bit more labor intensive. Let me start by saying posting less DOES NOT work on Instagram. So it worked to my benefit that I was tweeting less because I could monitor what was happening on IG. Influencer Advice suggests to post consistently and this was true for me. I posted 3-4 on my grid (3 photos and 1 Reel-pre experiment). I tried a combo of reducing pictures and reels but it was a mess so I went back to my original posting schedule (Monday, Wednesday, and Saturdays- for photos and Thursdays for Reels, then I added Tuesday for a little razzle dazzle). 

Without getting into the weeds I think IG is a clear example that you have to decide what's important engagement or growth (ideally it's both) then work backwards. The algorithm is pushing growth and rewards you for growth. Though, when I looked at my dashboard I was growing and losing followers at the same rate, confusing right. Let me explain, on average I gain 10-15 organic monthly followers, meaning people found my account and decided to follow. During this test period I gained 20-30 follows, but lost 10-15, so it put me back to my organic growth number. In my mind, the accounts that stayed are my actual target audience, so I take this as a good thing. 

Side note, my goal is to stay under 5,000 followers. It's important to me to be able to respond to DMs and comments. I think growing beyond 5k would be too much for me to handle with my schedule. So this false growth was good to see because it helped reaffirm that I should focus my attention on engagement. 

Although, I did benefit in the sense that I saw a change in my overall engagement rate. I have been hovering at 7% for at least a year, but after making these tweaks it increased to 10% and as of this post is almost at 12%. I met my internal goal for this year a lot earlier than expected, yay!

Engagement rate is calculated by total impressions /# of followers  

So, why is IG complicated? What I found is that there wasn't a clear one size fits all strategy. But for reference here are the Insights during the timeframe I made the changes below...

**While these Insights are not the entire time period, I think it's important to see the outcome of the actual strategies that seemed to work.

Just so we are on the same page let me insert a few vocabulary stuff for good measure (sorry this is the educator in me): 

• Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts
• Impressions – The total number of times that all your posts have been seen
• Insights – The number of impressions, reach, website clicks within a certain time period 

May-July sample 

• # of Posts 32
• # of Reels 14
• Total Combined Insights (photos & Reels) 13,729 / # of Followers 1748 =  8% engagement rate
• Monthly differences
• May Insights 3748 / # of Followers 1729 = 2% baseline
• June Insights 3834 / # of Followers 1731 = 2% testing 
• July Insights 6147 / # of Followers 1748 = 4% implementation 
• The line graph shows lots of fluctuations between May through July; the best performers, you guessed it were Reels. 
• Reels 👻 Murderbot May, Thick Thighs Save Lies, What I'm Reading, and Mafia Romance 
• Best performing photos were Dolore, Love Languages, and Subgenres (denoted by the highlighted spike). 

So here's what I did...

1. Post daily in Stories 
• Format size 1080 x 1920 px (9:16 ratio)
• Daily stories is a must even if it's sharing someone else's post.
• Influencer Advice suggest to include polls and questions help with engagement (even if only one person responds) and also use filters. 
• It also seems to be the only feature on IG that allowed me to continuously engage with accounts I actually follow. *So it might be good practice to share all content to stories to ensure your followers see posts.*
2. Photos on the Feed or Grid 📷
• Format size 1080 x 1080 (1:1 ratio)
• I switched completely to digital photos last year and I'm not turning back. It helps with my planning and my engagement is actually better with digital photos, which is great to see because it reflects my reading. I mostly read ebooks and audiobooks now. Influencer Advice suggests posting multiples books in the photo and use longer descriptions/captions with a call to action to like, comment, like, share, etc. 
• Images with lighter backgrounds with some background details did better than photos with solid colors. I have to keep looking at this because it's the opposite for Reels. I can't make sense of what would be the difference and couldn't find a concrete answer why either. 
• Indie vs Traditional digital images performed about the same, though photos with Carousels (multiple photos or videos) appeared to make the most difference with my Impressions. Though, it seems that my get to know me posts do particularly well. You like me, you really, really like me 😅😘
• Here's the order engagement actions that impacted my photo Impressions- Comments, Shares, Saves, and then Likes. I based impression performance on averages and then reviewed all the posts that were above the average. I would strongly recommend taking a look your dashboard to determine your Insights. Influencer Advice recommends Saves, Shares, Comments, and Likes for the best IG Impressions. 
• Clarifying point- Saves and Shares had difference outcomes for me. Saves are intended to help with engagement but my average Save is 2 while Shares is 4, which means Saves are not impacting my engagement as much as it could be at this moment. I suspect this might change overtime now that my engagement has increased. 
3. Reels 😈
• Format size 1080 x 1920 (9:16 aspect ratio)
• 7-15 seconds performed the best. Influencer Advice suggests 9 second reels to encourage the algorithm to show your Reel on the IG explore your page. 
• Influencer Advice suggests using trending songs, though this might become an issue later on since songs are being removed frequently. IG will occasionally highlight which songs are trending which is helpful for you to save later and there are accounts that that's all they post, Using either option is better than watching a bunch of Reels to figure it out. 
• Reels resulted in the most page visits and it seems that Likes mattered in this case for impressions. Influencer Advice suggests Shares have the most impact. Review your Accounts Reached and Plays to determine your impact. 
• And as previously mentioned solid backgrounds seemed to perform better. Influencer Advice suggests that it could be due to the compression process and changing the quality of the video, but I can't say for certain. 
• Posting Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday between 12-3:00 p.m. EST seemed to make the most difference, though if the Reel was longer than 15 seconds 7-9:00 p.m. EST seemed to move faster. 
• Again, use your dashboard to help make decisions because Influencer Advice suggested posting after 9:00 pm is better because most of IG users are on the west coast, but my followers are on the east coast (New York, Orlando, and Atlanta) so I think it is prudent to post based on my community rather than some general feedback.
4. Videos 😶
• Format size 1080 x 608 pixels (landscape) to 1080 x 1350 pixels (portrait) best compression quality MP4 (based on advice I could find).
• I abandoned because of the time it took me to make Reels (ideas, creating, and writing captions) though Influencer Advice suggested to focus on Reels, so I felt okay with not doing a deep dive.
• I saw the best viewership when videos were connected to a Live so instead of making separate videos (e.g. vlogs) saving your Lives might be a good or cross posting preexisting videos.
• Side note: I did not schedule any Lives during this time period so I don't have any data or advice. The bullet above is purely based on view numbers. 
• Update: As of writing this post all videos on IG were converted to Reel formatting. 

A brief note about Hashtags

• I used the IG dashboard for this section...
• They still seem to be a useful feature but I recommend using ones that are specific to the post. Influencer Advice suggested using no more than 5. However, I found that it didn't matter the amount but rather making sure the hashtags had ≥500 trending uses and I included some variation of book blogger, bookstagram, bookstagrammer, and reader or romance reader.
• And hashtags appear to help with the 48 hour cycle particularly with Reels (for me at least). I think this might be related to the fact you can follow and search hashtags, so they aren't a huge game changer but can be helpful.

In the end, unlike Twitter there wasn't a singular strategy that worked, but it was clear growth and engagement were definitely interwoven on Instagram, which complicated the matter. As I mentioned previously you are rewarded for growth, so if anything else the goal is growing or for me finding the right accounts, then engage, engage, engage. To drive this point home for me for every NEW follower, my insights need to increase by roughly 750 impressions and increases 1-2k the more I grow 🤯. So, if you want to use IG to connect with friends, Stories and DMs are where's it's at--which I think might be intentional based on the CEO's recent post 😬.

Final thoughts on IG- 

• From purely a numbers perspective when I looked at the entire year there were at least 2 algorithm shifts mid-January and then again in May. These changes definitely impacted my overall Insights. The mid-January changes overall were helpful from what I can tell, which is not the case for the May change. During May early June my photos Impressions were the most stagnant. And while I was working on this blog there's some indication there's another one coming 🤦🏾‍♀️.
• The burning question I'm sure you're wondering is-- 

Do I think you HAVE to upload Reels to make IG work for you? 

The short answer is, it's not clear quite yet. With the multiple changes aside photos still 'performed' in terms average Impression numbers. There was a dip in my photo Impressions in July but it was negligible. A workaround to correct for that was I sandwiched photos between two Reels or posted a photo and the next post was a Reel. Both posts in most cases benefited from each other😕. However, I would say this with some caution because it was NOT consistent. For this reason, I don't think Reels are a must, but rather could be helpful for overall engagement. This is why I'm a broken record, you have to take a look at your numbers to make the best decision. Reels are time consuming so you might be able to use other features coupled with your photos to make it work. 

• Three strategies I do think can be an alternatives to making Reels that I found helpful were 
• Posting Carousel photos, this function did about the same Impression performance regardless of a Reel.
• Strangely enough (maybe not so strange) tagging other accounts had a similar effect, as in the photo performed at the same rate as photos sandwiched between Reels. 
• Another option is pinning to your profile, which is why I pinned the Love Languages post to my profile. This feature was a May update, so I would leverage this feature exclusively for photos. 

Phew, I know that was a lot but do you see why Instagram was complicated?? Still, I think this exercise helped me think about what's important, how to leverage the changes to the platform to align (or as align as closely as possible) to meet my goals, and finally help me understand what's the best way to use my time. It's definitely easy to get discouraged but for now I have a good strategy to move forward. The biggest takeaway is you can't just take decreased numbers at face value.

Update: After I finished writing this blog post, I found a HootSuite post that did something similar with their IG analytics. While there account is much larger, their findings where similar for the most part. It's another confirmation that we are all trying to figure out IG. If you want to read it in your spare time, here's the link to the post. It also includes other metrics that might be interesting to look at.

Finally, the blog! This one hurts because I love writing blogs (as you can tell from this long ass post 😂). My readership numbers remained flat, so there's not much advice I can give here. Although, I always think there's a learning opportunity even when numbers don't give a clear answer. Some considerations from Influencer Advice that might help improve readership-

1. Repost more than once (day and evening) and throughout the month.
2. Reshare existing posts.
3. Use Google analytics to help find key terms to use in blog post titles. 
4. Cross post on all platforms (Twitter, IG, and Facebook) consistently.
5. Create a Pinterest account to drive traffic to the blog. Here are two really informative videos. Video 1 explains why to use Pinterest and Video 2 is a part of a 3 video series, but this video focuses on making clickable pins. 

Regardless of net changes to my blog, I still want to nurture this space. Influencer Advice recommends having a central location for content whether it's a blog or website, so that people/brands can find you. While I didn't see any changes, I went ahead and updated the shell to match the aesthetic of my new avi, which I quite love. The other thing I did was connected the SnapWidget plugin so that it connects to my IG posts. My thought here is while I figure out what to do different with my blog newish content is still being featured, therefore, my blog isn't just siting stagnant. Here's a video on how to add the widget to your blog. I'm still ruminating on how many posts make the most sense, because frequency of posts doesn't appear to make a difference. Based on my current readership numbers author interviews and blog tours are working. 

Alright, that's all folks, that's everything I learned during this mini experiment. I want to reiterate this advice is based on fluctuations I noticed on my accounts, so you might have a different experience, especially if your goals or how you use your platforms differ from what I described. However, if you have any tips and tricks please let me know. I think the more we share the better our experiences with content creation can be that and cloning ourselves. 

Happy posting!