In today’s digital world, the power of social media is undeniable. Each platform offers a unique way to connect with your audience and share your brand’s story. But simply being on social media isn’t enough. Consistency is key, and it can significantly affect your online visibility and reputation. In this post, we will delve into why consistency matters on social media and how maintaining a steady presence can influence your engagement rates, brand recognition, customer trust, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
How We Tested How Consistency Matters
If anyone noticed that our social media went flat for a week or two, that was planned. While this is not what most companies would normally do, we wanted to get a clear indication of what it would be like for a company starting completely from scratch to get traction on social media platforms and what to expect for their Digital Marketing. We normally post on 3 platforms: Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn so we stuck with those 3 platforms.
What Types Of Posts Did You Test?
We tried to make things as universal as possible. We stuck to Reels and shared links to posts on all platforms (so no one platform would see an advantage). What was wild to us was that we got wildly different results on each platform on the different post types. Facebook went nuts over reels and LinkedIn was all about the articles. Instagram was a combination of the two with carousels getting more views and traction after the reels started populating. We’ll expand on this more in the results at the end.
How Often Did We Post?
We tried to write one blog post and post one reel per day. These were new bits of content that we thought would help users and also be targeted at our services. What is interesting is that some things we thought would be very catchy and trendy got very low views, and other broad topics we thought were boring seemed to really catch on. We will get into that more in the results to follow.
What Was The Content We Posted About?
Since we provide services for Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Website Design, we decided to have at least one reel and a blog post on each of them. The days we chose to post the content were not in any order, but we did learn something important for your content calendars that we will advise clients about.
The Results To Prove Posting Consistently Matters
Overall we posted 5 reels to Instagram and Facebook, we posted 5 links to articles on all platforms, and on LinkedIn, we added 5 posts that were updated to balance the load across all 3 platforms. In total, we put out about 15 pieces of content, we used roughly 45 unique hashtags, and we targeted 15 seed keywords (focus keywords). We did this amount because we felt that even a small business that has very few employees could keep this pace up and not feel overwhelmed.
Let’s get into what you are all here for: the growth stats.
Stats That Stood Out
On Facebook, we saw our reach go from 0 to 1,600, an estimated increase of 2500%, including 6 new followers who were cold leads (had 0 interactions or views from our posts before). This is staggering because, after only 5 reels, we got our message out to over 1,400 people who had never seen us before.
That is staggering growth that was on the verge of viral.
We were shocked by how effective the reels were, which in turn helped our link-sharing grow. On Monday, we had 1-2 shares, but by Friday, we had 42 links and 20 reels shared, and 77% of those shares came from followers. This means we had almost 30% of shares from people we didn’t even know existed to start the week.
On LinkedIn, one of the more shocking things was how fast our organic impressions grew from post to post. Starting, we were lucky if we got to 40 organic impressions when we posted. After we were done posting links and the week concluded, we had spiked to 500 organic impressions that week. That means that our keyword research matched our profile and what people were searching for very well and would continue to grow.
On Instagram, we saw our reel views explode. Three of our reels have surpassed the expected numbers (we expected to get around 100 views organically per reel). We also noticed a significant increase in reel views when we wrote targeted SEO captions that matched captions in the videos and search terms.
We were able to reach 605 accounts, including 529 non-follower accounts. This is a great number to achieve, coming from 0 in week 1. Four of our five reels exceeded 200 views, which was double what we would have anticipated since 2 of the keywords we targeted had difficulty in the 30s, which is difficult to grab on social media from a cold start.
What We Didn’t Do
We didn’t try and sell. Everything we posted that we counted as part of this quick case study was information. We also did not pay to boost anything because we wanted to track organic numbers, not people looking to make a purchase. We did this because targeting people seeking a transaction doesn’t translate to every industry.
Conclusion
Our conclusion is pretty clear, and there is a rhythm to social media posting. We did feel that by the end of the week, there was some fatigue in our approach, but overall, these are the core 3 things we noticed the most:
- Posting Reels is the best way to showcase your brand to non-followers.
- On LinkedIn, making a post without a link is more powerful than sharing a link to a blog post.
- Facebook users shared our posts more frequently than any other platform.
We also noticed that each platform’s unique algorithm weighs things differently. On Facebook, if a non-follower shared one of our reels, the total views exploded in a short amount of time. We also noticed that Instagram boosted the one carousel we made after 2 reels had surpassed 100 views, so, Instagram is now truly operating 4 separate algorithms that use data from each other (we can now prove it).
