what happens to engagement when you switch up your content format? (a live experiment!)

hiiii friend,

this week has been craaaaaazy you guys. obviously it was such a huge win getting to 1 mil followers on instagram over the weekend. like, i can’t even comprehend that number. honestly, it’s been a big few days just processing the last 6 months and everything that’s happened since i left my full-time job and went all in on myself. i know if you’re reading this you’ve been part of that milestone so thank you <3

so last week i confessed that after finishing my 25 things series, i have been completely lacking motivation to post on my channels. it’s been a low few weeks for a variety of reasons, and so last week’s newsletter was just as much a reminder for me as it was hopefully useful for you.

(((btw if you missed it, you can go back and read about how i get out of a no-motivation spiral here)))

so, now that i’m slowly working my way out of that procrastination hole and actually posted more this week, onto what i’m testing - and what i’ve learnt so far….

first, some context because there are a few things that have been running through my mind over the last several weeks.

the first one is that alistair and i want to differentiate our two brands. in the past, we always made content on my channels together. and for a long time, it made sense. you guys were used to seeing both of us in my videos. he didn’t really have his own personal brand.

but now, he does. and we realised that if we are thinking about our brands as two businesses, they each need to be able to stand on their own. that doesn’t mean we will never make content together, because of course we still will.

but having our own separate brands diversifies opportunities for us in the future. like if alistair wants to release a product or work with a tech or gaming brand, he can without it being tied to me. not to mention if one of us is travelling or sick, the other can still make content for their own channel regardless.

we have experimented with separating our brands a little bit already. and the response when i have done a series on my own, like the 25 things one, was great. my audience was interacting with me one-one-one. not just that, but you guys started writing actual paragraphs about how you relate to my experiences, like “i’m in this exact scenario. thank you so much for saying this.” which is exactly what i wanted to happen.

this week, i wanted to figure out how we can create content where our audience doesn’t feel like it’s jarring when they hear from us as individuals rather than together. so we started to go ok, how do we make this trial as easy as possible? because to be honest, i’m really lazy. like, really really lazy. and because I finally know that about myself, when I come up with ideas, they have to work for me. otherwise i just won’t do the thing.

so my mind went to trying static posts. and it was really just my brain being like, “i can’t be bothered thinking of another video concept. so what is the smallest, low-effort content stream we can try instead?” we looked at previous statics we’ve done, and they still got anywhere from half a million to a million views, which made us go, “why are we not just doing more of that?”

all that got me to this hypothesis:

now a big part of what i wanted to test was around that effort piece. because i hadn’t done enough statics yet to know whether they are actually less effort than a video. my thought was it might take the same amount of time, but maybe less energy because i don’t have to be ‘on’ for the camera.

the plan became for alistair and i to each post 1 static a day on our accounts, each from our separate POV. this would give us a bunch of data points to see how they compare to our videos in terms of performance…….