A Substack Writer's Social Media Experiment
My 2-week search for an audience
I’m going to post one video every day for two weeks and share the results with you.
I’ve been writing a newsletter on Substack for almost 3 years now.
Notes, leaderboards, those badges that reveal how cheap you are; none of them existed that first fateful day I used Substack to send my wife and mother issue number 1 of The Recovering Line Cook.
Thanks to Substack and its features alone, I’ve managed to build a pretty decent number of subs since then, certainly for someone with zero social media following and no previous published work.
But I’ve increasingly come to feel that it’s short-sighted to rely solely on Substack to find readers as well.
Billions use social media platforms and, thanks to the algorithm-based system these platforms use now, you don’t need any followers at all to get in front of tens of thousands of people with very little effort.
Earlier this summer I started dipping my toes into the TikTok/Instagram waters to try and build awareness of me and my work. That didn’t mean only going on there, telling people that I write a newsletter and expecting results. I thought about the stories important to me and my writing and I started making videos reflecting that.
This led me to the kind of thing I’m sharing below: a simple video about a favourite Finnish food with a voiceover about the differences between an aspect of life in Finland and England.
At the time I had about 200 followers on TikTok, but that salmon video was seen over 25,000 times.
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No, I’m not suggesting even a fraction of that 25,000 will Google me, find my newsletter and pay for a subscription.
But maybe it’s a first step.
I love social media videos. I love the thoughtful, interesting ones, and I enjoy the stupid ones my old chef mates send me. I also love sitting down to Alicia Kennedy’s Monday newsletter and Michael Procopio’s beautiful memoir work he shares on Substack.
Amongst the billions of people across Instagram and TikTok, I know there are people who would be interested in my writing as well.
How I’m doing this
Subject: My newsletter has always been as much about my life as an immigrant in Finland as it is about food. The content I plan to create for social media will reflect this while showcasing my personality (besides I could never compete with the high-end food content out there).
Form: Just like good writing, you can’t assume reader/viewer attention. Though I want my video content to be true to me, I know it needs to be optimised for the platform and I’m going to edit and structure things in the way that works on these platforms
Work load: This is a red line: everything I create will be done as quick and easy as possible. I want to create videos in minutes and on my phone. I have no time to make this a drain.
I want you to learn as well
The accounts I’m using on Insta and TikTok are old so I’m not starting from zero but I’ve only used them very sporadically over the years and only ever for friends and family. Also, the occasional posting I’ve done this summer has increased the followers a little bit.
But my experiment now is to do things differently and post every day for the next two weeks. Some videos will be thoughtful and take a bit more scripting such as the salmon one above, some will be quick and easy (like day 1’s post below).
I want to see what kind of audience I can build in that time, only using a little dedication and commitment that I can hopefully build on in the future.
I will be updating this article with the daily video and the results and lessons learned. If you’re curious, check back on this post, I’ll be updating it daily. Hopefully it can help some of you guys find a following of your own and, ultimately, lead people to your writing.
Day 1
I wanted to get going fast and while shopping on Monday I saw a product I considered “peak Finland”: licorice yoghurt. Not the most hard hitting of subjects, but so far it has over 60,000 views across TT and Insta.
Followers:
TikTok: 999
Insta: 2112
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Update (Oct 1): In this video I mentioned the name of the maker of the yoghurt, a brand called Ålands Meijeri. Åland is an autonomous island region of Finland that is largely Swedish speaking. This ultimately led to significant passionate debate in the comments to this post about whether Åland is Finnish. I believe this helped lead to the post eventally hitting 50k views on TT alone.
Maybe putting some contentious element into videos is a viable strategy?
Day 2
This post was actually based on an essay I wrote months ago here.
What I consider to be a heartfelt and honest observation regarding a cultural difference between Finland and England, eventually led to more debate in the comments. A lot of Finns (who I’m seeing make up much of my viewership) took issue with my impressions.
Mentally, I found this difficult. Though I’ve been publishing essays about my experience of Finland for years now, they’ve tended to be read by a non-Finnish audience. And several Finns in the comments took me to task with what I had said. Perhaps this was good for views, but it has been a lesson in how quick to debate/argue/push back people on social media are and that one needs to be prepared for that.
So far this video has about 20,000 views across both Insta and TikTok
Followers:
TikTok: 1018
Insta: 2134
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Day 3:
Apologies for lack of updates; I’ve prioritised actually running my experiment over maintaining this running update…
I definitely struggled with getting those first, how should I say, argumentative comments from that previous post. The feeling I found myself with was a real knock of confidence, as though what I want from these posts/my work is to be agreed with, pure and simple. I feel like this is a good lesson because, looking back, I don’t think I was wrong in what I said in the video (i’ve written about the same ideas in an essay I’m very proud about). But getting some push back was new to me. As a writer and “content creator” I need to be prepared to take comments (harsh ones I’m sure considering how vocal and unhinged some online folk can be) and not allow the process to undermine me somehow.
Anyway, for the next post, I went with an idea I’d been thinking about for a while, picking out a few favourite Finnish words.
Followers:
TikTok: 1025
Insta: 2155
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Day 4:
I inadvertently mispronounced one of the Finnish words. The comments lit up once again. My reaction was to own the mistake and I came up with a silly video playing on this:
Followers:
TikTok: 1045
Insta: 2179
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Day 5:
This day’s post is an interesting one. Having got 1000’s of views for all my previous posts (despite having only 1000 followers on TikTok, this post was my first the algorithm decided to show to only a few hundred people on TikTok (on Instagram it did much better) I suspect it’s something to do with me joking about “promotion”. Maybe such terms were flagged and penalised the video.
Followers:
TikTok: 1055
Insta: 2201
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Day 6:
It looks like the same story again today. I used a similar “promote me” joke about this weird Finnish quark product and TikTok barely showed my hilarious content to anyone.
Followers:
TikTok: 1060
Insta: 2220
Following is growing steadily though with each video posted. Also, despite the low views on these recent posts and despite my hjaving only 3000 followers across both accounts, my silly videos have been seen so far by around 100,000 people.
Considering I’m putting very little planning/execution into the videos I feel this is promising. But I need to work on encouraging people to follow perhaps.
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Day 7:
Coming soon
Have you considered being filmed while nude? This seems to make a lot of people go viral? 😂
No followers needed - that’s a very disruptive and promotes short posts that you can read quickly