One of Our Social Media Tests Failed

One of Webfor’s core values is innovation. That means that we take the time to educate ourselves, strategize, and ultimately create the future we desire by producing new products and services that move our clients forward.

With innovation at our forefront, we decided to test out a new and different Instagram social media strategy.

While the test didn’t result in the success we had hoped for, I want to share with you what we did, what we learned, and what we’re testing next.

Let’s dive in!

The Initial Idea

There are multiple facets of our business that we want to highlight on our social media channels — SEO, design, development, content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, our culture, client wins, industry news, and so much more. Instead of posting about everything on one social media profile, we were curious to see how having segmented profiles for each sector of our business would alter performance.

The team thought that if we had very targeted, niche profiles, we’d be able to curate a very targeted, niche audience that was also very engaged with our posts. 

What We Did

We created three new Instagram profiles and planned to continue utilizing our main profile as a conglomerate of posts from each niche profile. 

How We Managed Three Profiles

We posted two to three times per week on each niche profile. Then we also shared each of those posts on the main @WebforAgency profile, tagging the original profile and encouraging users to follow it in the caption. We also spent ample time engaging with similar profiles and posts each week to encourage engagement on our own posts.

What We Thought Would Happen

We thought we’d see a massive expansion in terms of followers and engagement on each of these niche profiles rather quickly. Because all of our content was hyper targeted and the audience we were targeting was also very specific, we expected there to be some immediate traction within each niche.

What Actually Happened

We gained a handful of followers on each profile as well as some engagement. But it wasn’t nearly as exponential as we thought it’d be.

After about two months of testing this strategy, we achieved:

• WebforCreative
  • 31 followers
  • 6 comments
  • No Reels shared

• WebforMarketing
  • 24 followers
  • 5 comments
  • Maximum of 195 Reel views

• WeAreWebfor
  • 21 followers
  • 3 comments
  • Maximum of 643 Reel views

While we were excited to see results of any kind, with the time it took to manage four separate Instagram accounts (plus all of our other social media profiles) we just weren’t seeing enough results to continue with this strategy.

What We Learned

Even though our test wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped, we still learned a lot and managed to build some followers in the process. Here are just a few things we’ve learned:

• Two to three photo/graphic posts per week, even if they’re well crafted, don’t seem to be enough to gain traction.
• Managing separate profiles can be more time-consuming than managing one profile sharing the same amount of total content.
• Hashtags do still matter! We noticed that posts with targeted hashtags performed better than those without.
• Instagram Reels rule the Instagram world right now. Two or three well-done Reels per week should be prioritized for optimal results.
• It’s OK to test something and have it not work out!

What We’re Testing Next

We walked away from this test knowing that we have far more diverse content to work with for social than we imagined. We’ve adapted the split approach above and applied it to our strategy on our main Instagram account. 

Now we post two to three times per week about each niche (Marketing, Creative, and Culture). We’re continually increasing the number and types of posts we’re pumping out to ensure we’re providing our audience with the best possible value and showing up as often as possible.

We’ll be continuing to use this method for the next few months in hopes that more frequent posts on one profile will develop more engagement and visibility with our audience. We’ll also be engaging with relevant profiles and posts weekly, exploring the use of Instagram Stories, and more. 

Do you think this strategy will perform better than our previous one?