What I Learned From Posting Content Every Single Day For 30 Days

I decided in September that I wanted to get back into content. I needed to.

Founder-led marketing is the way forward, and there’s no getting around that fact. I’m probably a couple years too late to the wave, but whatever, we don’t look back on “what-ifs”

The important thing is, I got back into content. I did it one day, and then the next, and then another time, and then once more after that.

Before you know it, January passed by, and I’d pushed out 28 Reels, 3 Photo Dumps, and 110 Stories on Instagram.

Some would say that’s a lot, but Zuck demands that sacrifice, as evident by how active bigger accounts on the gram are as opposed to smaller ones:

We want big. Always.

And so here’s what I learnt from sweating and scheming and calculating wearily before handing over my bloodied toll to the reptilian social media overlord every single day for a month (I just posted on IG every day for 30 days), and why I might be doing it again in February

How to get your first 1000 views

I learnt this one fairly quickly - If you’re not able to measure it, you won’t be able to improve it. Take a look at this sheet

So we have a track of every single post we’ve put out, and the number of views each of them got (keeping a 48-72 hour window for myself to calculate this, anything beyond that is just forced numbers)

We tracked views because that was our North Star starting out - the larger the number of eyeballs, the faster you grow. Super smart right?

When we looked at the videos/content with the highest views, we realized something:

If you hook your audience for 10-15 seconds, you get 1000 views

It’s as simple as that.

For every single post of ours that did +1000 views, our Average Watch Time (AWT) stayed between 10-15 seconds

Super interesting fact that I saw: if the AWT is between 15-25 seconds, you reach 2000 views. How crazy is that!!

Average Watch Time vs Views Comparison

5-10 Seconds : 500-600 Views

10-15 Seconds : 1000-1500 Views

15-20 Seconds : 2000 Views

20-25 Seconds : ????

I haven’t cracked the code beyond 20 seconds, but safe to say, every single video of mine that got a 15-20 second AWT (7/28 reels) - got 2000+ views.

Post timings are crucial

We realized this one, but I didn’t really stick to it, because our aim this month was to get consistent above all else - but I feel like if we’d planned properly, this would’ve really amplified our reach

Almost every single one of my posts went out between 7:00PM - 9:00PM (the first week I even touched 11:00PM, which was bad), and we noticed something

When are people most active on Instagram?

• Early mornings (5:00AM - 8:00AM) - poopy time doom scrolling

• Afternoons (1:00PM - 2:00PM) - lunch-time hangouts (less reach but )

• Evenings (4:00PM - 5:30PM) - EOD laziness kicking in - best time!

• Night (8:30PM - 10:30PM) - bedtime ritual

• Nightowl Hangouts (1:00AM-2:45AM) - rare night-owl frenzy

Post anytime outside of these, and your post takes a while to get its reach. Whenever I posted between 7:00-9:00PM, I wouldn’t see results till the 9-10:30PM crowd came online.

See Instagram has this queue system, I’ve noticed. Whichever posts are pushed more recently, they pop into your feed first. Last in first out

So if I pushed something at 7:30, and someone else (Rihana) posted at 08:28PM, her post is likely to show up on your feed first. Not because she’s Rihana or anything :) simply because she posted closer to the active time.

Again, I wasn’t really focussed on timing as a metric, because we saw that timing wasn’t the only thing that favoured more views.

But going into Feb, this will be monitored very closely.

Storytelling matters. Gyan doesn’t

Okay, there’s zero substitution for this. I knew this going in, but the data just reinforced it

What didn’t sell:

• Carousels (account isn’t big enough or data-worthy enough for people to scroll, find interesting, share)

• Gyaan (who tf are you to “talk expert” about anything?)

• Poorly scripted stories (no matter how interesting the topic - I for sure thought the Duolingo story was good, it bombed so hard)

• Forced hooks

What did very well:

• Authentically scripted stories (bringing your own personality into the mix is a great start to this)

• Experience-based storytelling

• Repeated hooks

My working (for now) storytelling outline:

• Hook (5seconds max)

• Story (10-15 seconds - the longer, the less effective)

• Hook (2-5 seconds max)

• Story

• Repeat

We will keep refining this outline for as long as possible. It’s still a far way from perfect.

Going forward

This was good progress for the first month, but there’s a long way to go. There’s a couple of things that will be our core focus in Feb

• Hooks - still not great at them, it’s often a hit and miss, need to refine how many more hits we can get

• End-CTAs - “follow for more“ isn’t working, need to do something (got any ideas? Let me know)

• Video editing takes a long time, will be streamlining this process, and eventually finding a person to offload to

• Fixed timing for the videos - targeting 4:00-4:15PM ideally

• Look at increasing AWT to 20+ seconds

• Push Jan’s content to Youtube, measure success as a sub-experiment

• Start commenting, following other accounts (sub 1k followers)

It’s going to be an exciting Feb :) Keep watching this space for more updates

And also, I will be moving forward to a weekly newsletter, just to make sure I’m more consistent with this :)

See you next week!!!

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