The results of my 90-day social media experiment to promote my show

Hey Reader,

In early February, I set out on an experiment to promote my new show on social media.

For 90 days, I was going to try to post:

  • On Twitter three times per week
  • On LinkedIn twice per week
  • On YouTube (as a post) once per week

​Check out all the details of the experiment.​

I logged all of my notes in a Google sheet and here are the results.

What went well 💪

  • I always posted early in the week with the new show episode and I mostly posted later in the week sharing an older episode.
  • I created and used a few social media graphics that I was excited about. See one example and another.
  • I also created a few local video snippets that I really liked. If I create a few per interview, I have a lot of content to share over time. See one example and another.

What didn’t go well 😕

  • I had heard this, but also found out for myself that audio-only clips don’t do very well. See example.​
  • I tried to mix it up with some screenshots of editing the podcast and key moments in YouTube, but these were all ugly.
  • I found zero luck with posts on YouTube and eventually stopped doing them altogether. Plus you can’t do any formatting in YouTube posts, so when I did post, it didn’t look great.
  • Twitter threads didn’t seem to do well at all. I had very few impressions, views and clicks.

Things I learned 💡

  • I have a short link for each episode and it doesn’t expand on LinkedIn to show the website featured image. I used this in one of my LinkedIn posts and it went out without an image. Since then, I’ve been using the link to the website post, the link to the YouTube video or the short link with other media (like a local video or document/graphics).
  • It’s tough to post something timely on LinkedIn. Once I posted a snippet about “tomorrow’s episode” and most people didn’t see it that day. By the time they saw it, the episode was already out.

What I’ll try next time ⏭️

  • Keep posting early in the week with the newest episode and later in the week with an older episode.
  • When I’m in between seasons, keep sharing consistently on social media – older episodes for sure, and maybe try Joe’s content flywheel for future solo episodes.
  • My call to action on most was to watch or listen, but I’d like to try just asking people to comment right there to boost engagement.
  • I do pretty well conversing on Twitter (asking open-ended questions, replying to other posts) but I need to do better on LinkedIn. I can’t just be sharing my own stuff without interacting with others. You know, the “social” part of social media.

In my original experiment, I said, “Hopefully I’ll be able to determine what kinds of posts got the most engagement.” And looking at the analytics, I was not able to. Most of the LinkedIn posts got around the same number of views, likes and comments. I checked the Twitter analytics and am not sure what to make of them.

I did check my website analytics for this time period and LinkedIn and Twitter are #2 and #3 so it seems that just posting regularly has gotten me visits to the website at the very least.

What do you think? Any ideas or thoughts about this recap?

And how are you not only experimenting in your business or life, but recapping how it went? Hit reply and let me know. I read and respond to every email.

Best,
Rene