What 2 months of content creation look like | MKTRSU #009

Ever wondered what it takes for your personal/company socials to take off? 

Especially in relatively niche and specific markets? 

Below I offer a transparent look into the efforts and numbers of my past 2 months of content trying to build this thing from the ground up. Because last week it was 2 months since I started this “content creation journey” and the first month’s summary on Linkedin proved to be a success so here goes. 7 newsletters, 8 long form videos and 68 short form videos resulting in over 105,000 views in the second month alone. Let’s talk about what happened, how it happened and what I learned from it.

My name’s Mark Valasik and this is the #009 edition of Marketing Right Side Up (or MKTRSU) newsletter (and also Youtube channel, and daily marketing memes on TikTok and Instagram). 

This is the place where I offer you the fruits of my rabbit-hole digging into the (mostly) marketing topic of the week. Except this one, which is mostly transparent data on my content journey.

If you hate structured bullet pointed text and love me going on lengthy yapperfests, here’s a bit more info in my latest video:

Also here are the top 5 news from last week:

- Instagram Reels compete with TikTok numbers globally.

- Google ends the infinite scroll on search results.

- EU claims Meta violates DMA with its ad-free subscription.

- TikTok to challenge Amazon with sales event.

- Gen Z trusts online comment sections for news the most.

If you want MORE NEWS, here’s the weekly AirTable of Social Media One Liners for the 4th week of June is here as well, where you can nicely filter pivot-table-style what social network news interest you:

What 2 months of content creation look like?

It looks like a lot of work. Two months resulted in 150 subscribers on Youtube, 310 combined newsletter subscribers and around 50 followers on Tiktok and Instagram. All this work, for “mere tens of subscribers” could seem like a zero-sum game, but long are gone the days of business content blowing up on Youtube or Tiktok. Slow and steady wins the race and on top of it all, my main goal was to have a creative outlet for my knowledge and the amounts of industry news I process every day, and hopefully someone could find them useful in the “bite sized” formats I make them to. So anyways, what were the Goals, Data and Learnings from these 7 newsletters, 8 long and 68 short form videos? Here it is:

🎯 GOALS:

Before I started creating content I had 4 goals (apart from brand awareness):

• Creating content I would watch
• Creating content younger me would find value in
• Creating content I enjoy making
• 1 long form, 1 newsletter and 7 short forms a week so I can squeeze it into 2 hours a day (which I’m constantly failing at, because I doubt I had a day I was able to spend less than 3 hours on this….)

And after the first month I’ve added 2 more

• focus on SEO, main focus Youtube and Newsletter, side uploads on TikTok and IG
• just 2 types of short form: social media/marketing news AND social media/marketing news in memes

Why memes specifically and why the focus on SEO I’ll explain later.

📊DATA:

Youtube 

• 18,016 views vs 48,324 views
• 47,500 impressions vs 84,600 impressions (impressions + shown in feed)
• 165 hours watch time vs 185 first month
• 85.5% came from Shorts feed vs 92.6% first month
• 5.4% homepage, browse, suggested, hashtags vs 4.7%
• 8.2% search vs 2.4% - very happy about this one
• 0.8% external vs 0.4%

1511 likes, 143 subs (80 from shorts, 37 from long form)

Top 5 Geos: US (53%), UK, Canada, Germany, Slovakia

TLDR; Youtube views dropped significantly due to absence of strong viral outliers like First month had + Youtube stopped promoting my Shorts content for 9 days for no apparent reason

Instagram 

• 19,683 account reached vs 3,821
• 25,065 impressions vs 6,148
• 99.7% non-followers vs 99.2%
• 0.3% followers vs 0.8%

323 likes, 17 comments, 120 saves/shares, 28 new followers

163 likes, 12 comments, 55 saves/shares, 34 followers

TLDR; Instagram performed massively better, but mostly thanks to one strong viral meme. Follower growth was basically non-present (compared to the reach growth).

Tiktok 

• 65,446 views vs 8,866 views in first month
• 31.2% FYP vs 88% FYP,
• 68.3% search vs 10.9% search in first month,
• 0.5% personal profile vs 0.2% following in first month

997 likes, 54 comments, 58 saves/shares, +10 -8 followers

306 likes, 49 comments, 38 saves/shares, 32 followers

TLDR; TikTok had even more of a outlier hit with one viral outlier, overall the drop in For You Page push is not a fail, since the traffic was overcompensated by SEO and therefore Search traffic. Follower growth even more abysmal than in Instagram’s case.

Linkedin:

• 3,033 unique views vs 4,177 unique views
• 10,821 all post impressions vs 11,246
• 2,519 newsletter impressions vs 2,509 
• 609 article views vs 242 
• 100 new newsletter subscribers (combined Linkedin and beehiiv) vs 210
• 35 engagements vs 26

TLDR; Linkedin hates me. Regular posting caused worse reach than with my past irregularly posted posts. Newsletter performed kinda well though I’m not sure if it’s worth it keeping it there and not moving it entirely to beehiiv instead.

Also, small plug - if you’re considering starting a mailing list/newsletter, can’t recommend beehiiv enough. This is not sponsored, yet, but full disclosure, I do have a referral link. Why beehiiv and not substack I explained in the latest video.

Other:

X, Threads, Snap use recycled content for extra impressions but nothing noteworthy.

I’ve stopped using Snap due to decreasing views, X is an after thought, but Threads became the main source of my procrastination, with one post testing the topic for next video having 2k views and one reply to someone else’s Thread with my firing story reaching 115k views, which is just insane.

📚 LEARNINGS:

After the first month I’ve summed up my learning as:

• “meme content works on IG and YT, not TT, educational content works on TT” -> so I combined them to educational meme content in 2nd month
• Ranking for search is easiest on TikTok with clearly defined keywords (not necessarily tags). The worst on Instagram and very unpredictable on Youtube with most of the views there I got for longform i got from homepage recommendation - this still stands, tho I had 2 SEO successes in 2nd month.
• Saving content and sending it to other people boosts Instagram reach the most, TikTok minimally, Youtube not at all. - this holds true
• The more time you spend on a short form content, the worse it will perform, that’s the law. - YES.
• Recycled short form content does not perform well on Tiktok, Instagram seems to like it tho! 

After second month, here are the fresh learnings:

• Linkedin works best with significant updates - like me starting my content journey, or my 1 month summary post. Other than that, everything was super underwhelming. Where my usual post reach was around 1500-2000 impressions, now I’m happy if I hit 500. Hashtags and links hurt the reach, same as VERTICAL VIDEO! Horizontal video, static image or poll seem to perform better but nothing amazing.
• Youtube still remains a mystery. While with Instagram and TikTok I would say I’m quite confident in what will work and what not, Youtube just straight out ignores some of my content.
• Also since I’ve focused on SEO, some of the youtube hits were from search, which is awesome, but the very next video flopped amazingly.
• First month I was figuring out types of content, 2nd month I’ve zoomed in on 2 types of short form and made them work on all three platforms
• Weirdest thing is how Linkedin decreases my reach and Youtube stopped featuring my shorts for 9 straight days without no apparent reason to any of these two phenomena.

The Third Month

My idea was always to do this for 6 months and then have enough trustworthy data to either cut production, scale or keep as is. So we continue! The plan for the 3rd month is to start creating more evergreen, “how-to” type of content. Memes on short form still serve as the top of the funnel promotion tool to create not only brand awareness but also niche connection (marketing memes -> marketing topics long form), and long form will steer away from locally interesting topics (Tiktok ban update, Meta AI update) and turn into more helpful, time-not-sensitive content.

The biggest mystery for now is what to do with Linkedin and how to approach Newsletter. Seems like a missed opportunity to completely leave it be, but also like wasted time to create standalone content. And also like wasted time to even repurpose content there as it flops massively. Oh yeah and I would like to go on vacay, but the content will continue! Don’t worry, you won’t even notice it (famous last words much?).

Cheers,

Mark.

P.S.: If you got this far, the next article will be a transition towards more how-to content, specifically about “Why businesses can’t grow on Instagram anymore”

If you have any questions or additions or topic requests, please do reach out!