An Instagram Experiment: Daily Posting

A month or so ago I had a wild idea. I launched my new website back in September and decided I wanted to post every day for 30 days to correlate with my new site launch. I wanted to do this basically just to see what would happen. It was a crazy idea because I was incredibly busy with client work at the moment. But, when I set my mind to something there’s no hope for anything else. So, I did it and set off on this Instagram Experiment.

The first thing I did is create a Google Spreadsheet listing the days, photo, action wanted, and caption. I always start with this layout. It’s helpful for me to see the content this way. Then, I go through and mark every fourth post to be a graphic – usually work from a branding project. After much work on this spreadsheet, I was ready to get started.

Then shit hit the fan.

And things got really busy. Late, late nights and rushed deadlines. Not how I want things to be, truly (I learned my limits in that season). I really wanted this to happen, but it seemed wild to make it a priority over my client work. So, I reached out to a VA for help. I cleaned up my spreadsheet a little bit to make it legible for someone else, and sent that, the photos, and my hashtag list over. She had it done in just a few hours, and that was the best money I spent that month.

Ok, ok but you’re wanting to know the results from this Instagram Experiment, right?

So, after posting every day for 30 days, I saw a significant increase in my followers. At the beginning of this Instagram experiment, I had 1,626 followers. At the end of the Instagram experiment on October 14, I had 1,748 and quite a few new leads from the platform. I have a moderately small account, so this level of growth was significant! Just for fun (and because I’m insane), I decided to keep going and I continued posting almost daily until the end of October. By then I had 1,820 followers. And, during this process I blocked a LOT of people who I felt were spammy or wouldn’t be engaged followers.

Disclaimer: Followers aren’t everything.

Please don’t count your worth by your followers. There’s a fine balance here. Followers are good and important, but they’re not everything. You can have a successful business without a large following.

Yes, some of this traction that I saw likely came from launching a new site, but I’m sure showing up daily on Instagram was a large factor. My engagement began to dip for each post, but it’s still a trial and error game for me to figure out the best times and tags to use. Just in this short time of posting daily on Instagram for this Instagram experiment I saw great growth. My gosh, imagine the growth that could happen if I had the capacity to continue this!