I don’t want your freaking insights.
Today is the final day of my 90 day social media experiment.
On January 23rd of this year, I started a little experiment: 90 days of engaging regularly on socials. 90 days of posting, commenting, and following through my business account, all with two goals in mind:
To see how many new eyes I can get on my art, and
To see if I can manage it without wanting to throw my phone through a window.
Like any good project, I’ll need some time to retro it properly; but in the meantime, I thought I’d share the most prominent takeaway from it all:
I don’t want your freaking insights.
I know — ironic, considering I’m an Insights lead at a major tech company, and my entire job is utilizing data to make good decisions.
But here’s the thing: insights (or “numbies” as I like to call them) create quantifiability, which creates the illusion of control.
“With over 2K views, this reel is getting a lot of attention. See what helped you make it great and how to keep up the momentum.”
Did you hear me scoff? After publishing nearly 100 posts — and studying thousands of others — I’ve come to the conclusion that small-following creators have very little say in “keeping up the momentum.”
Of course: don’t post during dead hours. Don’t be afraid to show your face. Talk about relevant things. Leverage the foot-in-the-door technique. Be attractive. Utilize all the base-level standards of common-sense marketing. But after that? It feels like a fucking crapshoot, man.
My top performing reels are about my partner’s grandmother, my cat bunting my head, and AI art. Posts where I utilized trending audio, or leaned into viral formats, just weren’t effective. As soon as I picked up on something that felt like a truth — like, “If a reel doesn’t gain traction within the first few hours, it fizzles out” — I was proven wrong.
I’m aware of how statistics work; and I’m sure, at the scale of millions, there are statistically significant relationships between content styles and the success of that content. However, from the perspective of a singular creator, those statistics mean very little to me. Even a with extremely small p-values and large effect sizes, the size of the population means that my entire lived experience can be within the variant population. It’s like looking at me and saying, “As an American Millennial, you’re most likely to be heterosexual.”
I hear you. That statement is correct. Also, that’s just not my lived reality.
I know myself. Agency is important to me. I tend to avoid circumstances where I have little-to-no influence on the outcome. And if building my brand or getting my art out there is an outcome I want to drive, social media is an undoubtedly painful experience.
There are a lot of knock-on effects from this learning. Insights are critical for strategic decision-making — and the negative feelings I currently harbor for them aren’t compatible with utilizing social media as a key marketing platform. If I plan to use socials moving forward, I’ll either need to change how I use them, or how I think about them.
All good food for thought.
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