← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
He Beat The Instagram Algorithm | 39K Followers in 90 days - 876
00:55:55
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- [00:00]
A
The more you post, the more you grow. On Instagram, there is a statistically significant correlation between posting frequency and growth rate. The more times you post per year, per month, per week, and per day to your Instagram feed, the more followers you will gain on average. I firmly believe that I have the number of followers that I do on Instagram, not because I'm some creative genius or I make amazing content, but simply because since April 1st of 2021, I have not missed a day of posting. And actually, since then, I've been increasing or accelera my frequency on Instagram from one post a day back in 2021 to now upwards of five posts per day. According to Adam Mozeri, the head of Instagram himself, the more you post, the more you grow. And I personally accidentally did an experiment in 2025 that reaffirmed this belief. For the first six months of 2025, I posted two times per day to my Instagram feed, which was my pretty normal schedule. And during those first six months, I. I gained 20,000 followers. In the second six months of 2025, I posted four and a half times per day to my feed, and I gained 65,000 followers. That means in the second half of 2025, I gained more than three times the amount of followers I did in the first half of 2025 for only about double the number of daily posts. And arguably, I had more things in my favor that should have led to more growth in the first half of 2025. If you'll remember, that's when I interviewed Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. That's when I did multiple collaboration posts with the creators account and Instagram for Business account, which are major pages that have millions upon millions of followers. And yet, even though the odds were stacked in my favor for the first six months of the year, I grew more in the second six months of the year. And the only thing that really changed was that I started posting more. I also want to tell you about the now infamous Instant Bollywood Instagram account, which has been absolutely blowing up by posting. Get this. Get ready to grab your jaw off the floor 100 times per day. They're gaining millions of followers per month. And they recently went viral themselves after having a conversation with Mr. Beast.
- [02:04]
B
How the hell did you guys get 30 million followers? You post 100 times a day. Yes, that's why I told you. How do you do that?
- [02:14]
A
We have a big paparazzi content, you know, being created here every day.
- [02:18]
B
But I, like, I would be terrified to post that much.
- [02:22]
A
Me too you, Mr. Beast. And I'm sure everyone else watching and listening today would also feel terrified to post 100 times per day. But as they said, they have a massive team. If you had 20 plus content creators at your disposal working for you full time, it wouldn't be that hard to post 100 times a day. But most of us don't have 20 plus people on our content team who are just dedicated to making posts on Instagram. And that's not what I'm here to tell you you have to do. In fact, today I'm interviewing a business owner who also happens to be a good friend of mine, who is posting 12 times per day. And not to spoil anything, he's actually scaling up and increasing that number and he's doing it without help. He's not even having anyone edit his content, make his graphics, he's doing pretty much the entire thing himself. Yes, he's using a little bit of AI, a little bit of ChatGPT, but for the most part it's all him. And he's doing this, like I said, as a full time business owner and someone who is a husband and someone who is a good friend and someone who's just a good overall well rounded person who's not just a crazy psychopath who creates reels all day. And so today I'm so excited to share with you my interview with Jamie Brindle where we talk through how has he been able to scale from three posts a day to 12 posts a day. And these 12 posts are mostly unique posts. It's not like he's just recycling the exact same 12 posts over and over again, but he is recycling something. And it will be pretty interesting for you to learn more about that. But most importantly, in this interview, I will get an answer to the question how. How the hell, As a one man show, as a one man band, as a solopreneur, more or less, is Jamie able to post 12 times a day, once every two hours? What tools is he using? What's his organization system look like? What is his process for creating the content and coming up with the ideas? And we will also talk through the results which to spoil that a little bit. He has grown thousands of followers in the last 90 days and pretty much every single metric, whether we're talking views, engagement or actual leads for his business, has gone up. I also ask him every question that I'm sure is burning in your head right now. Like what about Instagram stories? How much are you promoting your own business? How much time are you putting between Each post. How are you writing the captions? How are you coming up with so many ideas? And is this annoying your followers? Like, have a lot of people been unfollowing you and complaining about how much you're posting? All of that is about to be answered. So without further ado, let's get into our interview. Hello, Jamie. Welcome to the podcast.
- [04:43]
B
Happy to be here, dude.
- [04:44]
A
So excited to have you. Let's hop right into things. How much are you posting on your feed every single day on Instagram right now?
- [04:52]
B
Right now we are posting 12 times a day, plus, plus or minus. Because we are still, we're experimenting with some new formats. So sometimes that number is a little bit higher. But, but it's been a fascinating three months. We started, we started this experiment three months ago. So we're like, like literally like today, yesterday, tomorrow, somewhere around now, we're at the 90 day mark. So it's, we're, we're at the stage where we can kind of start taking a look at what the numbers are telling us about this effort.
- [05:22]
A
Yeah. Which kind of leads me right into my next question. I want to hear more about the numbers because 360ish posts a month, there's, I would say 90% plus of the listeners of this podcast won't post 360 times this year, but you're posting that much every single month. So, like, what, what have the results been now after 90 days?
- [05:42]
B
Yeah, it was fun. I was joking with my wife Courtney that, you know, we're at the stage now where if we wanted to just not post anything for the rest of the year, we've got a, we could post three times a day, every day for the rest of the year off the assets that we've built. But yeah, no, like, it's, it's been an interesting experience because I had been conditioned. I've been for a little context for the people watching. I've been on, you know, posting on Instagram for a couple, for four or five years now. So it's like I'm conditioned to a certain experience, a certain expectation for comments and things like that. And from, from our, from our content efforts leading up to this point. So initially when we started, the interesting part for me was everything seemed to drop. Like the, so the experience of doing it of the per. Being the person posting, I was like, oh boy. Like, I mean, I committed to this experiment. I want to see how it works, you know, but like engagement per post went down. Views per post went down. Like, so it was a little harrowing there at the start. But now that we're at this, you know, but, but I, you kind of trusted that in the aggregate and after a few weeks you could kind of see that it was working. But I wrote down some, some figures here because we've, we kind of hit our 90. Our 90 day benchmark are, are the reach of our account in 90 days increased 30% over the previous 90 days. Our profile visits are up 30%. Our external link taps are up 75%. Our new messages are up 77%. Our returning messages are up 32%. We've had 32,000 comments, 80,000 shares, half a million likes. So everything's going trending up. And then the last piece here is, which is, I'm interested in your thoughts on what your takeaway from this is. New followers. So all those numbers, new followers is only up 9%. Right. So you're expecting. Because everything was kind of trending about the same amount, but new followers went up 9, which is still, you know, positive. It's still 9% more than what we did the previous 90 days. But across the board there was not a single metric that dipped, you know, and every, you know, the needle was moving in the right direction for pretty much every, everything that we care about. Right. And engagement on the reels held because you know, on an individual basis we know how to hold attention and it's our or not engagement retention on the reels held. But yeah, like across the board we saw a pretty good result here.
- [08:29]
A
Gotcha. Just for clarity, so new followers, 9% more growth than the previous 90 days, not just like 9% period.
- [08:36]
B
Right, exactly. 9% in, in comparison to the previous 90 days.
- [08:41]
A
Do you know what your growth percentage was? Your growth rate in the previous 90 days? Because I think that would be interesting.
- [08:47]
B
I probably should have had that number written down somewhere before this chat.
- [08:50]
A
That's okay, we can like look that up afterwards and put it on the screen. I'd be interested because you know, if you went from, and I know this isn't the case, but if you went from 1% growth to 10% growth so you had 9% more, that would be lower than expected. But my, my hypothesis is that your growth rate was already pretty high. Like it was already 20% plus maybe in a 90 day window. And so adding 9% on top of that is a, is a pretty big jump.
- [09:18]
B
That's fair.
- [09:18]
A
That's fair.
- [09:19]
B
Yeah.
- [09:20]
A
It's interesting to know that like everything eventually went up and it makes sense. Like the reach on your account was up 30%, profile visits up 30% links, new messages, all of that getting into the, the weeds a little bit here. You said that, you know, early on you noticed a drop and you said you were conditioned to like, a certain amount of, you know, engagement, likes, comments, etc. And I think that's one of the biggest reasons that people struggle besides the, you know, keeping up with the consistency and ideas, whatever. If they can keep up with all that and they can scale up their posting, they notice what you noticed, which is like, okay, everything is kind of going down on an individual post basis. So question number one is, did that ever kind of come back up or was it like, hey, for the last 90 days, our average engagement likes views per post has remained steady and it has been lower than in the past.
- [10:15]
B
So there were outliers. Right. And I think this is what the, the again, in the aggregate, what the benefit is is it was more at bats, it was more raffle tickets in the hat. And so, you know, in an average 90 day period, we would, we would see, you know, like conservatively like three or four outliers, like grand slam posts, you know, and, you know, we now have 10, 15 of them, you know, that, that did really well. So. And, and all of those, you better believe are already scheduled to repost every three months for the next two years. You know, so it's, it's. So it's that, you know, we're collecting that data, you know, at a much more substantial rate, which, which has been, which has been great.
- [11:02]
A
Makes sense. Makes sense. So is it fair to say the average post, excluding the outliers, is getting less engagement in this 90 day window than in the past? But because you said there are more at bats, there are far more outliers for far more home runs to stick with baseball analogy than in the past.
- [11:22]
B
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the ones that aren't outliers, we've just kind of had to become accustomed to a new, a new baseline for what engagement and reach and views are.
- [11:33]
A
Makes sense.
- [11:33]
B
But again, at the end of, like, it's helpful to, you know, if I'm ever feeling like, ugh, gosh, like we're, you know, gone to the halcyon days of, you know, 200,000 views on every reel. If I've never feeling like that at the end of the day, I'll pull up the day's posts and I'll have my calculator out and I'll just tally it up and go see, it's okay, you still hit your 200,000, you know, gotcha.
- [11:57]
A
So like, the rationale, and I very much agree, like, this is very much how I rationalize things as well, because I'll scroll back to, like, my Instagram in 2021, when, you know, there was low supply, high demand. No one was really posting at that time. And I was like, gosh, I was getting 400, 500k views on every reel. Like, you know, what was I doing? Why was I not taking more advantage of this? But so is the way you think about it now is like, okay, everyone is struggling to get views, so rather than sticking with the struggle, I'm just going to increase my output. And then if you total up the views per output, the views per post, I'm actually going to be getting a lot more total views day by day, month by month.
- [12:37]
B
Exactly. And fundamentally, Courtney and I started on social media to help people. Like, we've got our agency. We're good. Like, that's what. So it was like we, we started to help. It was. It was circa Covid, when everybody was losing their jobs. And like, we wanted to tell people, like, yo, it might not feel like it, but something wonderful just happened. Like, just do this, this, and this, and you're gonna be fine. You're gonna, you're gonna make more money than you ever did at your. At your nine to five. And so, and, you know, since then, we shut down our agency because this business is doing so well. But that, but that has remained, like, that's our, Our mission has remained. It's to help as many people as possible. Right. And so this reinforces that mission too, where it's like, I have more chances to reach people where they are at the right moment, like, you know, in the right way, in the right, like, in the right space to get them to take action on something, you know, meaningful in their lives. So, yeah, I mean, it's so it. It. Yes. It has to do with inside baseball. Folks in the industry, views are down, and you're kind of interested playing the metrics a little bit and running tests for your business. But also, bigger picture is you're reaching more people. It's a chance to. Maybe this post, if I had only posted once today, this guy would have never seen anything from, from us, you know, because it's just, you know, the algorithm does its thing. So. So that's been super, like, gratifying as well, for sure.
- [14:11]
A
And I love the, the intentionality behind it. Right. It's not just like, well, let's try this experiment just because. And so I'm, I'm. I really applaud the, the fact that you're doing this as a way to, hey, I'm going to reach more people and then thus help more people. John Hugh, who I know, you know, CEO of Stan, made a really good analogy recently on one of his own Instagram reels where he was like, hey, no matter who you are, at best you're maybe going to have 1 out of every 10 posts outperform the rest. Like 1 out of every 10 will kind of be an outlier. And he said, if you're posting once a day like most people are, then that means you're having one outlier every two weeks. But for you who's posting 12 times a day, you're, you know, arguably going to have one outlier every single day. And so that's, that's a really interesting reframe. I'm curious, were there any other motivating factors behind this experiment? Because, like, this is a big bite to take off, right? Like, this is a huge endeavor. This isn't going to five or six posts a day. This is 12 posts, one every two hours. So was it purely want to help more people and reach more people or was there like a business motivation behind it? I'm curious. The initial idea.
- [15:20]
B
Yeah. I mean, selfishly, I just like doing challenging things. That's like a hobby of mine. I like pointing in a direction and walking there and just chopping down whatever's in front of me. So that checked that box for me. And then also in our business, Courtney and I have had a couple conversations on this where it's like we're kind of just in, Rip the band aid. Rip the band aid stage of our business where we just kind of have to like punch through a wall. And, and this is part of that action where it's like we just, you know, we need to, we, we need more top of funnel. We need, you know, more, more energy on our brand. We need more attention. And so this was kind of a, you know, we could do this, this and that, or we could post 12 times a day.
- [16:15]
A
Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. And I should have asked this earlier. How much were you posting like in the previous 90 day window?
- [16:25]
B
Previously it was three times a day.
- [16:26]
A
Okay, so you've four extra output.
- [16:30]
B
Indeed. Yes, we have.
- [16:31]
A
Gotcha.
- [16:32]
B
Yeah. And that, I mean, it's, it's interesting. You know, it basically not, the, the mechanics involved in posting 12 times a day are not that different than the mechanics involved in posting three times a day. So it wasn't, you know, like a huge learning curve to you know, I, I guess a lot of the, A lot of the foundation had already been laid.
- [16:55]
A
Gotcha. And that's, you know, exactly what I wanted to talk about next, which is probably the question that most people who clicked on this episode have been asking themselves, which is, like, how the f. Has Jamie done this? Like, how have you achieved 12 posts a day if you were previously at 3 or 4 posts a day? And like, you still want to be a great husband, you still want to have a social life, you still want to be a normal human being, you still have a real business to run. So how, like, let's talk through all the different things that you've done to achieve 12 posts a day.
- [17:26]
B
Yeah, okay. I, I, I wanted to do everything myself before I bothered with other, you know, bringing other people in, because I wanted to understand what was required of this effort. So up to the recording of this podcast, this is an entirely singular effort. You know, this is, this is just, this is just me.
- [17:48]
A
No editors, no nothing.
- [17:51]
B
No nothing. Wow. So I, that being said, I am an editor by trade. You know, it's, it's like I came up, I'm in la, I came up in the video production world, so it's very easy for me to cut something together, you know, pretty. In fact, I'll probably, I could probably edit 10 videos that I scripted and shot, you know, way faster than some, anybody else, because I, as I'm shooting it, I'm editing it, you know, like, as I'm scripting it, I'm editing it. So it kind of collapses that, that, that the time required on those pieces of content. But, you know, for me, it definitely involves a lot of organization and, you know, the kind of economies of scale. But how do I want to approach this? So basically what I did was I sat down and I listed out content formats that I wanted to test. And these content formats are, you know, they're kind of getting swapped out as they're clear winners and losers. Right.
- [18:51]
A
I want to even pause you right there. What do you mean by content formats?
- [18:55]
B
Right. So content formats for me are, I don't know what the Brock Johnson terminology for this would be, but for me, internally, content formats are like series, right? So it's like, I have a new pro where a new freelancer is talking to a pro freelancer, or there are two single image formats that we have. We have a tweet post style, and we have a quote post style where it's a picture of me. There are two carousels that we're currently posting. We have A client conversations format where it's text message thread between a client and a freelancer. And then there's a Notes app format where it's just kind of a journaling. Jamie's talking to you via Notes app. Right. There's, you know, clips of our master classes, whereas there's a master class that we post on YouTube that gets clipped out into. Those are usually good for about 62 clips. Got it. Totally.
- [19:48]
A
And that's the same. That's the same phrase that I use is I call repeatable formats, but it's content formats just. That can be kind of almost like templatized, if you will. Right. Where it's like.
- [19:58]
B
Exactly.
- [19:58]
A
Each. Each tweet screenshot, to use that as an example is going to be a different tweet, but it's still a screenshot of a tweet or a screenshot of the Notes app or a clip from a masterclass. Okay, that. That makes sense. So you started by making a list of all of the different content formats that you either had done in the past or wanted to test in the. In the future.
- [20:18]
B
Exactly, yeah. And then I, and then I, I essentially. And I recruited ChatGPT for. To help me here, but I essentially spent a couple hours a day for, we'll call it two, maybe three days, scripting 31 posts for each format. Right. So it was a scripting endeavor first. So that's the first. And as I said, we've got a business to run over here. We're doing other things. So it's like, this can't be my full day. So I would bring, you know, ChatGPT has been trained on our. Our GPT has been trained on thousands of pieces of content. All of my, you know, all my writings, all my newsletters, everything. If you, if somebody watching this doesn't have thousands of pieces of content, here's what we've been doing because we, we now advise B2B Enterprise clients on growing their LinkedIn. And we have chat. We have. Well, I interview them for an hour, but we have ChatGPT write these questions. I'm like, here's what we're trying to get done. What are the questions? What do you need to know about this person to do this? You know, and then, and then we go interview that client for an hour and 90 minutes and then take that transcript and start their language model. Anybody could do that, right? It doesn't. So you just have chat. Tell ChatGPT what you're trying to get done or whatever language model you want to use and have it interview you. But. So that's, so it's scripting first, right?
- [21:40]
A
And when you say scripting, I really, I love slowing things down. I'm trying to take on the role of like the very beginner. When you say scripting, and this is, I think, something that will be a little bit of personal preference. But do you want, when you have a script, word for word scripting, do you work best with outline scripting? Bullet points? Like what, what works for you, particularly
- [22:03]
B
for an effort like this? I don't want to put any thought into the words coming out of my mouth on the day of production. So it's going to be word for word scripting because when it comes time to shoot, it's go, go, go. Right? It's like, set the camera up, read the words, read to the camera, read the words, read the camera, set the camera up over here, Read the words, read the camera, back to work. You know, so, because, you know, on the day I might be exhausted and I just might not be firing on all cylinders and whatever comes out of my mouth might not be that well thought out, you know, so I'd rather have that work done preemptively. So, yes, fully scripted. There's a couple formats we have which are. It's clips of me during coaching calls or during panels and things. And that's unscripted. So scripting first and then we go into production mode. And my personal preference is I want to do the hardest stuff first because if I'm ever down to the wire, if there's, if there's work left over, I want it to be the easy work, you know, so I picked the hardest to produce content first and, and knock that out and I work my way down the ladder to the easiest to produce content. And, you know, so usually that's, I sit down for an hour and I, and I shoot out every, every reel that needs to be shot, you know, or, you know, I'll, I'll, you know, producing the carousels in, in Photoshop or, you know, going to, going into the studio to shoot a masterclass, those stuff, those are, those are big chunks of time. And then like a tweet, A tweet post. Yeah, that's all the way at the end of the line, you know.
- [23:49]
A
Gotcha.
- [23:49]
B
Because I can make 31 of those, you know, in, in 30 minutes.
- [23:53]
A
Yeah, totally. I do find that interesting, you know, and again, it's a personal preference thing. I'm the exact opposite. I'm, I love to, like, bang out the easy stuff first. I won't do all of the easy stuff, but I'll bang out, you know, if I have, let's say an hour block to record reels, I'll spend the first maybe 40 minutes doing the quick hitters. The stuff that I'm like, okay, I know I can do this trend. I know I can do this. Like, I'll just bang out those quick ones. Because for me, and again, it's totally personal preference. I think for anyone listening, there's no right or wrong. I enjoy the satisfaction of being like, hey, in this hour, I might not have done like the best possible stuff. I might not have recorded a podcast or a masterclass, but in this hour, I did like 12 trending reels that were pretty quick. And so that's what works for me. But it's interesting that that's different for you.
- [24:38]
B
It's kindling for the fire. Yeah. But I will say get that fire
- [24:41]
A
going whether it's me or you. What we're both saying here that I want people to take away is that content recording time is content recording time. Like, it's as you said, like bang, bang, bang. We're banging it out. We're hopping from video to video to video. I think a mistake a lot of people make is they stop after each video and they try to see it to completion, right? So they film their reel and they immediately go into editing, refining, script, like over, over, planning, over editing. And they're writing the caption like they're doing all of that at once. But it sounds like that's not what you do.
- [25:14]
B
No, no, no. You know, when I first started on Instagram, it was a daily effort. I would literally script, shoot, edit and post whatever that day's reel was.
- [25:26]
A
And that's how most people are still progressing. Like I would say 93% of our listeners are still on that amster wheel.
- [25:34]
B
Yep, yep, it's. But you know, it is the, you know, the water's warm on the other side for sure. The grass is greener. I would say, you know, move yourself over to kind of the batch, the batch lifestyle as, as soon as possible.
- [25:48]
A
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- [30:07]
B
That's an interesting question. It's, it's a little it's not like officially on the calendar so it kind of makes you know where where I can fit it in. But you know I guess the takeaway is that this shouldn't take that long like if you're and that was probably one of the first things was because before this effort my conversation format where the new is talking to the pro that would usually go like it would be new. Freelancer posts a question, pro answers it but that opens up a bigger curiosity gap. Newbie exposes the bigger curiosity gap. Pro answers that one and then it Loops. So there's two exchanges, right? And quickly, after about two weeks of this, that became one exchange. Because it's like, I'm not shooting, you know, so. Because essentially if you're shooting 31 of these, right, it's whatever, 31 times four is, is how many times each one of these people talks, right? And so I cut that in half.
- [31:11]
A
Gotcha.
- [31:12]
B
And that made life a lot easier and wouldn't, you know, made retention a lot better because suddenly these videos just get to get to the point, right? And if I felt like something needed a little further explanation, exploration, that became another post. That's just another reel, you know, so it wasn't an issue. And it just. So it's like you start finding yourself identifying those where it's like, okay, how do I optimize this? How do I optimize? And they're not like, it's not like, you know, huge, sit down, have a meeting about it. It's like just like in the middle of shooting one day, I was like, delete, delete, delete. And then from then on, I just included that in the chat GPT prompt. It's like we're only doing one exchange.
- [31:56]
A
Makes sense going back to this organization piece because I think that's another thing that's so going to be so huge, especially if you're doing 360 posts a month. Like software wise, what are you doing to organize? Do you have a cloud storage system? Which one are you using? Do you use goog sheets notion? Like, how are you on the back end? Okay, hey, I just got done filming an hour. I have 70 clips that I have filmed. Then what?
- [32:23]
B
Yeah, so the, the footage. And this might just be for. Because of my editing background, but the footage all exists locally. Like, I, I don't like there's. But also there's no reason for the footage to go to Google Drive if I'm the one editing it, you know? So it's like, why? It's like I'll upload it to Google Drive and then redownload it to edit it now. So the footage is all stored on a hard drive for me, but the scripts and the exports all live online, right? So the scripts are all on Google Drive. So each month gets a folder and within that folder is all of the folders for each content format, right? And then within each of those folders are the scripts are the necessary scripts. And if screenshots are required for a particular format, those go in there too. So that's kind of where our assets lives on Google Drive. And then exports, we've all got up on loomly. Right. So that's where we schedule everything. And interestingly enough, that's been the biggest time suck of the whole thing, is scheduling it all out. Just because it's just a number of things have to go into scheduling one post. So you know, that's probably first on the chopping block when it comes time to start hiring people for this. For this for me is to just put someone in charge of distribution because I mean, I'll spend an entire Day scheduling 12 posts a day. You know, copy the caption, paste the caption in, pick what apps is going to go, upload the footage, wait for the footage to upload. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, it's up, hit schedule, go to the next day, do it like, you know, and you do that times 400 to get the week scheduled, you know, to get the month scheduled. Like so. Yeah, but it's, but that's the process.
- [34:14]
A
Gotcha. Okay. I think that makes sense. And that's very similar to what my process is. Slightly different tools, but very, very similar. And so for anyone listening, this isn't the biggest sample size, but sample size of 2. Two people who post a lot on Instagram are in agreement on that. Gotcha. Okay, so posting that much 12 times a day. I noticed you posted a screenshot on your Instagram stories recently, and I saw that each post was pretty much exactly two hours apart. It was like 11:02am, 1:02pm, 3:02pm how did you choose that frequency? Was there any, like, testing there? I'm curious, like, what went into choosing those times?
- [34:55]
B
Not a ton of strategy in there. It's just, you know, every, every two hours. And I don't know if there's any credence to this, but I've always posted at random, random integers, not at like exactly two o' clock because I just feel like everybody schedules it for two o' clock and you know. Yeah, so, so I, I try to make it a little bit, a little bit of a unique posting time. But I think, yeah, I mean it's, it's going to be interesting. We, we plan to add more formats starting this month. So, you know, and, and we've just brought in a friend of mine who's a, who's a screenwriter out here to help kind of explore some more entertaining narrative formats. So, you know that, that 12 is going to become 15, 16 this month. And I just, I, I want to see, I want to see how far this goes, you know, I mean, I'll keep, I'll, I'll keep at it until it starts telling me to stop. But I, you know, I, I think that as long as, you know, we're happy with the content and as long as it's, it's helping people and it's, we're not just contributing to the noise of social media and just like throwing junk against the wall, you know, there's no reason to not to not contribute. Also, probably, maybe even more importantly, definitely even more importantly is the business metrics, right? The, the newsletter signups, the, the people joining our program, the people joining our paid newsletter, like all those metrics have gotten the same love that the metrics we started this episode with got. So that's been motivating as well.
- [36:34]
A
Totally, yeah. Do you have any specific percentages or numbers that you can share there? Because at the end of the day, I'm here and I know you're here to help business owners, so it's cool. Get more followers, more views, whatever, but if it's not translating to business. And I know you mentioned earlier, you said link clicks. I think you said we're up like 75%. New messages up like 77%. Both of those things tell me that, like, you know, you're getting actually more business from this. But is there any other sort of like, direct business correlations that you can share?
- [37:06]
B
You know, metrics are all, are all where you want them to be. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's been exciting for sure. And also here's an interesting added benefit is we've been able to high. And I think this contributes to this because whenever I get the number for the community, you'll see there was a big spike in the community in, in December, like, right dead center of, of this experiment or effort. We've been able to kind of hide promotions in all of this, right? So it's like, I think we were pretty allergic to, like, overly promoting stuff before this, because if you're posting, you know, a couple times a day every day, and one of those posts every day is a promotion, people are like, man, would you shut up about this thing that, that you're selling us? You know, like, and, and so we would have to, you know, kind of be very careful about how often we're doing a sponsored post or how often we're promoting one of our products. And now, like, I don't, it's not even, I don't even care. Like, we, there are, we have like one or two posts a day going out Promoting our, you know, I mean, our paid newsletter that's had that growth, that 30 whatever percent growth that's got a dedicated content format. So every day we're promoting that thing. And, you know, and it's not felt because it's one of 12, you know, it's. It's like, it's such a, it's such a small percentage of the content that, that they're being exposed to.
- [38:31]
A
Totally makes sense. And that was another question I was going to ask is, like, what the actual percentage of posts are that are promoting something. Speaking of promoting something that I know some listeners are curious about, something I'm just personally curious about is as someone who does sponsored posts, when you're doing a, like, paid collaboration, a sponsor, a sponsorship with a brand, they don't care how many views you're getting per month because they only care about how many views you're getting on that individual, like, promotional post. Right. So I'm curious, like, what has changed? Has something changed? How are brands approaching this? How are you approaching it with brand brands in terms of, like, sponsored posts and things like that?
- [39:10]
B
Yeah. So we've had one, maybe two brand deals in the middle of all of this. And in both cases, the post did gangbusters like it. It literally, it like, where the brand was like, this is the best. This is the most people we've, we've had sent to our landing page from a social media effort this year. You know, so it's like, it just reinforces that, you know, social media right now is no longer about, you know, you and the collective. It's, it's literally like each individual at bat. Like, if, if a piece of content is good, Instagram isn't going to go like, now, hang on, wait a minute. How many times has he posted today? Do we want to, you know, it's like, it's like if you make a good piece of content, it's going to cut through, it's gonna, it's gonna hit. So, you know, and we're very particular about the brands we work with because we want to maintain that batting average. Like, we want to maintain. That's too many baseball analogies for one podcast. We want to maintain that, you know, that record. So we, you know, so, so that's part. That battle is kind of won before it's begun. Like, we don't work with somebody if we don't think we're going to nail it. But. But yeah, I have had some interesting conversations with brands that I haven't worked with, though, that have surfaced that concern where they take a look at our page and they see all of the view counts and they go, well, this isn't what we're interested in. We want to. And so there's a little education that needs to happen where I pull up, well, okay, well here's the two that we've done during this and here's what happened and here's what they said and here's what the conversion rates were. And you have to kind of have that discussion. And some agencies and some brands, they have a quota to hit. They're just buying impressions and you know, they don't want to, they don't want to make that bet. But we're very fortunate that, you know, we could spend the rest of the year with not a single brand deal and do just fine because, you know, what we're doing over here is for our business.
- [41:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Speaking of like questions, complaints, concerns, whatever, I'm sure people have been listening today and they're thinking, won't this annoy my followers? Won't this make my followers frustrated if I'm posting this often? So let's just start with have you received complaints, frustrations like what's your unfollow rate been looking like over the last 90 days?
- [41:28]
B
Great question. And it was something we were hyper aware of and pleasantly surprised that it has not been an issue. It's not been unfollow rates have, have, you know, basically held at what they were before. And again, I think goes to show that people are being seen content that they want us. Like the algorithms have just gotten that good. It's like if somebody's really interested in what I have to say about freelancing, they're going to get a bunch of my stuff and they're going to be happy about it, you know, and the second they're not happy about it, the algorithm will pick up on that and stop showing them my stuff, you know, so it's, it's like not something that we really have to concern ourselves with. I would say anecdotally, it's been interesting how when I've been, when I've encountered folks from our community out in the world, the, you know, you know, someone else stopped me on the street or something, or we were at the conference and we met a bunch of people that follow us. The, the message, the conversation has, has been starting here more and more recently with, hey man, I'm glad that you're back.
- [42:35]
A
Yeah, yeah, they thought you feel like taking time off.
- [42:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, or like hey, man, congratulations. Like, you're really killing it right now. Like, congratulations. And. And that has been it. Like. Like, almost every interaction I've had with somebody has been something like that, which is hilarious to me because it's like I've been posting three times a day and. And that's. And we had conversations then where it was like, is this too much? You know, is this. Is. Is. Should we. Should we dial this down a bit? And meanwhile, there are people who thought I just stopped posting for two years, you know, and it took this. This effort to finally, like, punch through the content so that they can start seeing my stuff again.
- [43:16]
A
Yeah, that totally makes sense. Something you mentioned earlier is something I want to circle back to. It's what I call upcycling. And it's just this idea of taking your outliers, your best performers, and then reposting them 90 days from now. I know that you're just coming to the end of this first 90 day sprint, but have you been doing that already? Number one and number two, how much are you going to be doing that in the future?
- [43:40]
B
Yeah. Yes. So everything. So on my. On my loomly, I have kind of an emoji system where if something did really well for metrics, like for follows and impressions, it gets a certain stamp and gets upcycled, to use Brock terminology, to be posted every 90 days. And if something did well for my business, because that might not be the same, you know, it might have not done great views, but I saw a spike in program sales that. And I can attribute it to that post. If I can attribute it to that post, it gets a different stamp and that gets posted every 90 days. Right. So already, that has. That has begun. And, you know, already I think one or two of them have already reposted. And then this week as we. As we speak, I took the. Because we. This is interesting, too. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. There was like, serious vanity metric spikes in the first week of doing this. Like, the first, like 14 days that we did this. I was like, damn. Like, like, I, like, I was like, here we go. Like, this is. This is really doing it. And then everything kind of like leveled and, and. And went to what we've been talking about where, you know, I felt like, oh, man, we're not getting a lot of views, but in the aggregate, it was working. But that first week, you know, really like, it. It just like, shot through. Like, we got thousands of new followers and, you know, a shitload of people joining the program and so this week, right now, because as I'm testing, I literally were reposting that entire week right now to see if it happens again or if it was some sort of. I don't know what it, what else it could be. So, so I'll have to report back and let you know what works there. But I'd be interested in what your intuition says about, about that phenomenon that is interesting.
- [45:31]
A
My intuition is not necessarily that it was just higher quality of posts. Like, my guess is now maybe there was like a couple outliers that like really went gangbusters that week, but I feel like you would have noticed that yourself. So I don't think that was the case. I think it was kind of just, hey, suddenly you spiked your posting. And so the algorithm basically had, let's use these oversimplified terms, let's say most of your followers, the algorithm had decided that they want to see 60% of Jamie's posts. You know, like to use an oversimplification. And so normally if you're posting, you know, three times a day, your followers are going to see two out of those three posts every single day. But now you overnight jump to 12. Now it's going to see 60% of 12, which is like, what is that, seven or eight of your posts. So you're showing up in their feed much more, and then you're having seven or eight posts per day that are getting seen and that are getting a lot of engagement and that are getting a lot of, you know, likes and comments, whatever. And so that's my guess. And then kind of the algorithm recalibrated and it kind of figured out, okay, hey, Jamie's followers, they actually now they don't want to see 60%. They want to see 25%. But still 25% of, of 12. I'm giving myself hard numbers. That's what, three? Yeah, yeah. So there's. They're still seeing more posts. They were seeing two out of three. Now they're saying three out of 12. They're still seeing more total posts per day. And that's why your overall account impressions have grown. I hope that math made any sense to people listening.
- [47:04]
B
Even if the math was wrong, the spirit of the, of the statement made sense. I. But neither of us, I don't think, are math people. No, I don't want to speak for you. I'm not a math person. I'm, uh. But yeah, okay, interesting that that makes sense to me. I. It almost now begs the question of when it is time to add formats on Top of what we're doing. I wonder if we, if we wait and keep our powder dry on those formats until we can hit this play, run this play again, where it's like, okay, was posting 12, now is posting 18, you know, versus, like February I post 14. March, I post 16. Like, I wonder if there's something to that or if that's over optimizing.
- [47:49]
A
It might be. It might be over optimizing. But I would just be curious to see what actually happens when you do do that. And that can be like, hey, six months from now, let's have Jamie back on the show and talk about what happened there. Because I could see the argument for jumping from 12 to 18 and experiencing a similar jump from when you did 3 to 12. I could also see the inching up sort of thing where we, you know, 14 this month, 16, 18. I'd be curious to see, like, how they differentiate, but I know that there's no such thing as too much posting, so I'm just excited to see how this continues to grow. I am curious, though, about other kinds of posting because everything we've been talking about so far has been feed posts. So what are you doing on stories? Are you scheduling and batching Those and posting 300 a day, or are you kind of treating stories as like your just own personal, normal routine with stories?
- [48:41]
B
Yeah, stories have not been getting the same treatment and that I, you know, you'll have to school me on, on your stories philosophy. I don't know if that's sacrilege on these, these hallowed insta hub club grounds, but stories, Stories have not been getting the same treatment. They're more kind of, you know, as it's, it's a place to kind of share timely insights or, you know, if somebody DMS me something that's, that's got me, you know. You know, particularly, I'm like, okay, I'm tired of dealing with this DM we're going to talk about in stories. Like, that's, that's what stories are for me. It's also a place for us to sell. So we, you know, we post a lot of promotional content on stories. That does really well for us.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, that's. That's exactly what I would recommend. I mean, on the feedback, it is true that more is more. The more you post, the more you grow, the more engagement you get. All of your numbers are up. You are a perfect living example of more is more. On the feed on stories, it's the opposite. It's less is more. Less stories usually equals More views, more engagement, more retention on stories. And so the way you are using your stories is pretty much exactly what I do and exactly what I would recommend. So good job there.
- [49:54]
B
I love you accidentally, right? Yeah. It's a good feeling. You get to be all the good of being right, but you don't have to put any work into it.
- [50:00]
A
And then what about trial reels? Are you doing any trial reels? Are you posting 700 a day? Have you experimented with those?
- [50:08]
B
So I, in the early days of trial reels, I used and abused, right? And I saw some benefits. And then I was probably one of the first people on Instagram to get the notification of like, hey, cut it out. You're. We're limiting your or limiting your ability to do this. And I haven't really been back since, although I do. I use trial reels for brand deals and for promos for my own stuff. Right. So I'll, I'll, you know, you know, don't, don't tell the brands. This, this is my secret weapon. But I will, you know, audition five versions of, of that post and see what works. Go back, recut, throw another three or four up there, see what works, you know, so that when, when it comes time to post this thing, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's good to perform well. And, you know, so that's. And then I do that with our promos too. It's the same with us, right? Like, you caught me. It's. Yeah, I've literally, I filmed four reels this morning. I have another eight to film tonight, the rest of the day, all promo reels for a webinar that we're doing at the end of the month, you know, and those are all going to go up on trial reels. But is there, I mean, I don't know, like, what's the, this version of trial reels? Like, is there something that we should be doing that.
- [51:27]
A
I mean, what you're doing is. I think that's so, so smart because you're ba. You're using trial reels as they are intended. And I think that you were super smart for the first X number of months, as was I. As was I recommending using abuse trial reels. Right. And then Instagram kind of slapped us all on the wrist and was like, all right, everybody chill out. And so I've been experimenting with myself just posting different content to trial reels, kind of using your system for posting 12 times a day, but doing that with trial reels. But I love the idea, especially for Brand deals, especially for promotional posts where, hey, these are posts that you really want to do well. If a normal post goes viral, yay, great, I got some good vanity metrics likes, maybe I got a boost of followers. But I think everyone would agree that if you could choose any posts to really do well, it would be the posts that are for your business, that are driving leads, that are driving customers, or that are driving, you know, sign ups for a brand that you're partnering with. So I think that's a super, super smart idea. And the limit of how many trial reels you can post per day varies account by account, but it seems like the low end limit is five. So what I usually tell people is post no more, no less than five a day. But it sounds like what you're doing is a really great idea and just a great way to use them as they were intended and actually get results from them and have good data to go off.
- [52:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I write like similarly in the same way that we're saying that we can hide promos in 12 posts a day. We can kind of hire hide like bad posts in 12 posts a day too. So it's like almost like my feed posts are basically trial reels, you know, it's like, you know, where, you know, and, and when, when something does well, we do more of that. When something does terribly, we do less of that, you know. But yeah, I mean, I think I'd probably be most interested in figuring out trial reels from the angle of, of new followers, of reaching folks that, you know, because I do feel like there's a, and this might be totally, you know, qualitative anecdotal debt like this. I mean, the numbers obviously are, are saying the opposite, but I do feel like we have, you know, the analogy I've been using is it's, it's, it's a hotel and we've been standing in this one conference room full of people, and in the course of four years, we've gotten them all to follow us. But now that conference room is empty. And so now it's time to walk into another conference room and get all of them to follow us and figure out what attracts them and how to meet them, where they are, how to tweak our messaging so it makes more sense for them. And I think that there's an opportunity there with trial reels that we're not exploiting because by nature it's only going out to non followers. Right. So I, I'd like figuring that piece of it out is probably A big question mark for me that, that needs to be solved this year because it does seem like there's. That's, that's the, like, trial. It's a, it's a potent tool and it feels like I'm not using it to the best of its ability quite yet.
- [54:30]
A
Totally makes sense. And I love what you were saying about kind of, hey, my feed, If I'm posting 12 times a day, kind of is a trial reel. And that's. I posted a thread about this recently and it performed well. And people were kind of having a lot of light bulb moments where I was like, hey, the great thing about a bad post is that nobody sees it. So it's kind of like it'd be like, again, we're using so many baseball analogies today. It'd be like, hey, if every time you struck out, all of the crowd looked away and there was only a couple people looking. But when you hit a home run or when you got a base hit, there were more people looking, more people watching, and so it's even like less bad to strike out. Like, if I was thinking about this earlier, there's no such thing as a good post that doesn't get a lot of views, and vice versa. There's no such thing as a bad post that does get views. So either it's gonna perform bad, but hey, no one saw it, or it's gonna perform great. Yay. It's a good post and people are seeing it. So anyways, Jamie, I appreciate all your insights today. I love that you've been doing this experiment. It's inspiring for me and I hope it's inspiring for everyone listening. Final words, anything, any recommendations to all of our listeners today?
- [55:39]
B
I would say, I mean, along the same lines of what you were just saying is, is nobody's watching, nobody's like, I, I literally, I have, you know, over, across social media, over850,000 followers. And I guarantee you if we pulled all of them right now on what my post this morning was about, they wouldn't be able to tell you even if they watched it, even if they watched it twice, I guarantee, I bet that they still wouldn't be able to tell you because it's about what that, that moment where they, you know, consumed that piece of content and then they moved on to the next 700 pieces of content. So, you know, there's never a case where that's not true. Like, nobody's paying attention. Right? So just do the, just have some fun with it, like figure out what works and it's one giant game of data collection, you know, and so it's, it's, it's, it truly is that simple. Like if, you know, if, if you do something and the data gives you a big thumbs up, do more of that thing. If you do something and you get no response from the data, do less of that thing, you know, and, and just keep it, keep it there. Don't, don't try to over complicate it anymore any more than that.
- [56:49]
A
Thank you so much for listening today. We actually didn't talk about it at all in our conversation, but Jamie is an expert in helping freelancers grow their businesses on social media and really just grow their businesses in general. So if you want to check out Jamie, if you want to follow him, or if you want to just take a look at some of what his repeatable formats look like, you can check him out by clicking the link down below. Also, put the link to his free newsletter in the show notes. And again, thank you so much for listening today. And as always, happy networking.
- [57:20]
B
Sam.