I am a big proponent of using social media and online advertising for the brands that I work with.
But I have not been very active on my personal profiles. I decided to change that in February with a “Show Up On Social Media” challenge.
As part of this challenge, I decided to post one post a day on social media.
This was my second challenge of the year after the 31 days daily writing challenge in January. I aimed to be regular with my writing so I continued publishing a new post every day here though the challenge was over. I have updated my February word count on that post. You can read it below.
Daily Writing Challenge
For February’s Show Up challenge, I decided to post daily on my Facebook page.
I did not make a grand plan. I just started.
Here is what I noted.
- My first post was a ‘how have you been’ post. This was the post that got me maximum organic traction. Maybe because Facebook wanted to hook me by showing my post to a lot of people and generating comments. The reach declined with subsequent posts.
- We know Facebook organic reach is low these days. I went in with this understanding. Despite this, I had a couple of posts that prompted good discussion.
- I had planned on doing posts and paid campaign related to a program I was launching. But ended up not doing it. Instead, I posted related to my interests in personal growth and human excellence.
- I posted both words with a link and text-only posts. There was not much difference in traction.
- I used Facebook advertising 2-3 times with different goals. It worked ok. I was happy with one ad that I ran to drive users to my website. It showed good results with around 15 clickthroughs for every dollar spent. Users who came to site stayed on the site longer than the average visitor. I may leverage advertising more in the future.
- On some days I leveraged scheduled posts.
- It took some discipline and effort to post regularly but it was not too much. On some days I wrote a quick post and on others, I shared my blog post with an opening commentary.
- I tried being active right after posting a new post this helped with the traction on several occasions.
- Consistency is key to social media. Content is also important. If you want to see success in the short term then rely on paid media.
I was able to publish one post a day for all 28 days in February so I’ll call this challenge a success.
March Update!
I continued this in March as well and published one post a day for all 31 days in March, except for one day when Facebook was down. To account for this, I published two posts the next day. This is also why I wrote the post about creating a direct connection with your community.
Through this, I got decent traction for some of my content. One change I made that I started adding links to my content directly on Facebook instead
April Update!
I continued with this in April as well and published one post a day for all 29 days in March, except for April 30 when Facebook did not let me post because of algorithm thinking that my content was not right for Facebook, I requested for a review but have not heard back at the time of writing this update.
On April 30, I also ran a couple of ads on Facebook which Facebook let me run despite no allowing me to post on my feed. These ads did well. I ran them to promote a landing page that I made as part of a global challenge where I was participating.
You can check out my other experiments like this here.
I hope you’d run your own experiment like this to inculcate discipline and challenge yourself.