071 – Can 90 Posts Change Everything? [Spark Infinity]

Commit, do the work, and everything will work out. We’ve all heard, and possibly even clung to, some iteration of this platitude. But is it true? In this installment of Spark Infinity Office Hours, David reflects on the last 90 days of posting to Instagram, and the results he’s seen from his efforts. Later, David and Jody further unpack what they’ve been learning and discovering in growing a social media presence. Download the PDF Transcript Sponsors: Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.” The Renegade Musician: David’s magnum opus on building an independent music career is here! Highlights: 00:17 – Introduction 00:55 – How it all began 01:32 – Content rollout 02:19 – How paid exposure was used 02:49 – Analyzing the stats 06:40 – David’s next steps 07:12 – Lessons and discoveries 10:25 – Pockets of genius 13:57 – Next steps 14:30 – Group discussion Transcript: David: Welcome to Spark Infinity Office Hours. It is October 17th, 2024. Today, I don't have a presentation for you so much as a 90-day review, and I am joined today by Jody. How are you doing, bud? Jody: Good. David: Thanks for being here today. Jody: 90 days. That's a lot of days. Staying consistent. David: Staying consistent. Yeah. That whole 90 day… like we started with Spark 90 and transitioned to Spark Infinity. So that's part of the significance there. I still came up with as catchy of a title as I could, which is can 90 posts change everything? This is how it all began. I started posting again to Instagram daily on July 18th this year. I originally created my account on December 7th, 2012, just for reference, anyone who's wondering. And when I started Spark Infinity a little over 90 days ago, I had fewer than 1000 followers. To be honest, it was probably something like 850. And I got a cold start, meaning I hadn't posted anything to Instagram since February. There are different reasons for that. Clean slate happened in February. But the months following that were also, I was in a transition, figuring out what I was going to do for work and passion in life. The content rollout looked out, looked something like this. I talked a little bit about this and I think the initial or maybe even the first ever Spark Infinity office hours. But the first push had nine posts. Then the second had eight. The third had 10 posts. Fourth had 19 posts. And then I finally found my rhythm with the fifth push, preparing 53 posts and then scheduling them out. So initially I really had no more than about a week's worth of posts, which meant I could spend one day creating stuff, scheduling it out, not have to do something for a week. Eventually I got to the point where I could, I was much further out, 20 days, 30 days. And so in total, I published 99 posts, but Instagram counts your stories as well. So it turns out I published 210 posts, including stories. Paid exposure, paid promotion and shout outs were utilized during this process. But to be specific, I'm only relying on one source of paid promo and only one shout out was purchased so far. I did purchase another one today. Paid exposure ended up generating the most followers and engagement of anything I did. So compared to posting and sharing out my Instagram account on Spark Infinity calls or in the podcast and things like that, where I saw the most followers and engagement was with paid promotion. Probably the biggest thing you'll notice is that I'm up to 6,346 followers starting at under 850 and certainly under a thousand that may be noteworthy. The other thing that might stick out is the 4,000 accounts reached in the last 30 days. But the really funny thing I noticed was I checked this on desktop, but on mobile, those stats look a little different. It looks more like 12,000 accounts reached in the last 30 days. So I don't know what the discrepancy is. I have yet to figure out why that happens, but just know that these stats look a little bit different in my mobile dashboard. I will attempt to narrate through. I don't have any huge revelatory discoveries in these stats yet, but I think the more I stare at them, the more stuff I'm going to find. So in the last 90 days, there's been a reach of 9,735 accounts reached. So almost 10,000 people have at least seen the posts, whether they did anything or not with them is a whole other matter. By content type, hosts had the most engagement and then reels and then stories. But this is really not a big surprise given that I created more posts than anything else. Fewer reels, fewer videos and some stories. You know, by and large, I reached more non-followers than followers, which is kind of nice. Engagement number, 8,834 accounts engaged. Vast majority non-followers. It's incredible. So I engaged 23 followers. Shows how much my old friends care. And non-followers, 8,811. Again, by content interaction, posts had way more engagement by a huge margin, but the reels actually had a pretty good reaction and stories did okay. Considering I was probably posting two to three stories per day, that tells me even though it's kind of worth doing, it's not something to stress over. That's for sure. And then profile, 6,577 visits. Out of those people, three people clicked my link tree. So that's not doing much for me right now. And then of course the followers are up to 6,351. Instagram provides some other really good stats on, hey, here's the times where people are engaging most on Monday through Sunday. And that will be worth looking into as well in more detail. This is just a really brief glance into top performing content. I realized pretty quickly as I was delving into this that I could honestly spend hours. There's simply different ways of visualizing this content. Instagram gives you a lot of options and I'll talk more about that in a minute. But what we see from top performing content is the three reels that I published most recently, they say about 14,000 views, but in the mobile, it actually says 30 over 30,000. I think that paid promotion, that's an unexpected side benefit given that I think a lot of the other content was getting maybe two, three, 400 likes max. So within insights, you can view top performing content based on views, interactions, accounts reached, accounts engaged, and shares. And based on which option you select, you're going to get a completely different view of which content was ultimately top performing. I've really only done a surface level dive of this so far. And in fact, I probably could have spent 15, 20 minutes on this alone if I had spent a little more time looking into this today. But there's at this time, there is still much to be learned from outperforming content. In other words, the content that did the best. And I think this is the way a marketer would think if they publish 90 posts, they would look at top 10, top 20, do the 80, 20, figure out which ones were working best, and then iterate on those, create more like that. Looking to the future, I've already planned out a bit of content beyond those initial 90 days. I'm going to address my strategy, just like I said, looking at the content and figuring out what worked and what didn't. Incorporate more visual media reels and videos into my content schedule. That's already starting to happen. Use more humor in my posts. In settings like these, it may not always come across, but at play, I have a sense of humor that while does not appeal to everyone, does appeal to a certain demographic. And focus on what I'm good at. And I'll talk more about that in a moment. I'll share a few lessons and discoveries. Creating and publishing content did not always spark joy on this journey. Consistency can be like that though, in my experience. I really have no problem coming up with new ideas. And I definitely had some fun. But at times, generating and editing captions kind of felt like a chore. At first, it was fun. I was writing it myself. And then I decided to start using Claude.ai, which I love. And then I made a prompt and then I tweaked the prompt. And then I kept tweaking the prompt. And that was kind of fun. Once I settled into a groove and was kind of getting what I liked, it was less fun. Next lesson or discovery, running multiple promotions simultaneously makes it harder to measure where the results are coming from. This realization comes from running the ongoing promo, paid promo alongside shoutouts. It's much better to isolate your promotions. And running them independently would make it much clearer what results you're getting from each channel. And this was a timely and super important discovery. I'm really not good at all aspects of marketing. I shared in an earlier video on fine-tuning and micro-adjustments that I've been learning and trying many things simultaneously in my business. And this had a really great benefit. So spreading myself out like that and tackling different aspects of my marketing, it taught me that I've got pockets of genius where I operate exceptionally well, but many, many other areas where there's no fruit on the tree to speak of. Let's start here. I'm great at writing, but in a sense, I suck at blogging. Neil Patel gets over 500,000 visits per day to his website. Sometimes 600,000. He's amazing at blogging. I've had sites that got me over 1,200, maybe 2,000 visits per day at a time. I've never seen six figures. And him and I even started blogging around the same time. I think he was maybe a year earlier than me. I'm great at interviewing people, but I suck at podcasting. I have trouble sticking to themes, staying relevant to my audience, weaving narratives, knowing the difference between content that will work versus what won't. James Schramko has earned over 5 million podcast downloads to date. I've only got 110,000.