If you’ve been reading The Wine Marketing Field Guide for any amount of time, you know I’m a big fan of quality over quantity. I would rather you put out one really good post a week than post every day and burn yourself out.
BUT there’s a lot of compelling evidence that if you can maintain a daily posting cadence with quality content, your account will do well. And being a woman in STEM, I love to test a hypothesis, so I decided to post on FOXEN’s Instagram once a day for the month of October.
Now, this can’t be a legit experiment because I have no way to control the variables. Though I run social media for three different wineries in Santa Barbara, they’re all very different, so even if I had the capacity to do this experiment on all profiles, the results wouldn’t really be comparable. Even comparing FOXEN’s analytics from previous months to this month doesn’t meet the standards of rigorous science, because the content each month is necessarily different and the elusive Instagram algorithm changes frequently.
It’s also not a guaranteed replicable result. Sure, I can say, “if you post quality content once a day, you’ll grow faster than you would posting once a week… probably,” but there are way too many variables (and anyways “quality” is subjective and not really quantifiable when it comes to content).
What we CAN do is pose a more or less testable, measurable hypothesis.
So here was my theory:
If I post original, quality content to the FOXEN Instagram once per day in October, including at least one Reel per week, and respond to comments and DMs daily, the account will net at least 65 new followers for the month, which is roughly double our usual 30.
A note before we go on: it’s nearly impossible to track sales from organic Instagram posts. We can make guesses based on Google analytics and Instagram insights but unless you have a very specific coupon code that people can only get if they see a post on Instagram, tracking exact numbers is hard. SO, I did not include any sales data in this case study. That said, there are lots of other ways to measure success.
Here are some of the guidelines I set for myself:
Post original content once a day.
Post a Reel at least once a week, ideally more often.
NO AI. Not even in the planning of it. I (smug smug smug) want to show that this kind of thing is possible for someone to do with their own creativity and moxy.
Respond to comments and DMs daily.
The Results (in a Nutshell)
Total posts: I missed posting on five days total: October 11, 19, 20, 29, and 30.
Reels posted: 11
Total New followers: 105 (goal: 65; usual: ~30)
Average weekly new followers: 23 (vs. usual ~7–8/week)
Profile Visits: 982 (typically ~300)
Website taps: 34 (goal: 30; baseline: ~23)
Profile visit → website tap rate: 3% (typically ~8%)
Reach compared to September: 87,794 (Oct) vs 12,961 (Sept)
Top 3 posts (in terms of engagement) and why I think they worked:
The Boys Are Back in Town: Shock value. We had a ton of comments from people to the effect of “creepy” / “gross”
Just Act Like I’m Not Here: Trending audio/concept. Plus the opening shot is of a dog. Bitches love that.
Apropos of Nothing: People LOVE Billy. Anytime I need to goose the ratings a little bit, I either post something with Billy in it or show the dogs. Heaven help us all when I show both.
What I Learned
Beyond the obvious benefits, posting daily makes you less precious about your posts, and you get more data in less time than you would by posting only a couple of times a week. I figured out what worked and what didn’t faster; I was also less afraid to experiment than I usually am on our normal cadence, and as a result, I had more successes. One of our best-performing posts was done on the fly. I don’t think I would have made it otherwise. Likewise, one of the posts I had planned more meticulously —having actually conceptualized it back in July when we first started harvest— did only okay.
This challenge also allowed me to play around a bit with when we posted, and I learned that the time of day and day of the week you post means jack shit these days. One of our best and one of our worst posts were made in the morning around 10 am. And same story in the evening. I think if I do this again, I’ll be more intentional about time of day. Maybe post every day in the morning the first week, the afternoon the second week, the evening the third week, and, if I’m feeling crazy, in the middle of the night the fourth week. I’ll think about it.
Something I think you will all want to know is how much time this took per day: Some days were quicker because I’d already had an idea in my head, and it was really easy to execute. This post we did at the beginning of the month took maybe 30 minutes from idea to posting. I think the part that took the longest was getting the video from my camera to my phone (and part of me wonders if it would have performed better if I’d just used my phone instead of my fancy camera.)
Other posts took much longer. This one took me a couple of hours because I had to sift through a bunch of old footage from the last couple of years to find videos that were long enough and showed enough of what I wanted it to show. It probably would have taken less time for me to just drive out there and get fresh footage to use, but alas, hindsight.
Who I Think This Would Work For:
Daily posting is a lot of work for anyone, but it’s easier for people who work on-site and/or have a team that’s bought in on capturing a ton of content. I cannot emphasize enough the sheer volume of content one needs to get for something like this to work. It’s much more challenging/less sustainable for remote marketers and for people whose teams aren’t on board with the shenanigans.
It really makes me appreciate wineries like Tablas Creek (hey! We made it almost all the way to the end of the article without me mentioning them!) and CHO Wines, who have been posting daily for years. (P.S. The fine folks behind Tablas Creek and CHO Wines were interviewed in a case study in Wine Business Monthly about Social Media last year. You can read the article by Brianne Cohen here).
This challenge was only possible for me because my friends at FOXEN trust what I’m doing. It also helps that my husband works there and one of my best friends is the Director of Operations, so communication and news flow much more freely to me.
What I would do differently if I did this again:
I definitely want to try this lil’ experiment again, but next time I’d have a more solid plan in place.
I’d have at least half of the posts ready to go a few days in advance (with the understanding that things can be rearranged if something interesting comes up).
I’d create a stash of what I like to call “back pocket content.” Essentially evergreen posts you can pull out of your back pocket when you’re stuck.
I would also make sure the clients are fully aware of what’s going on and how they can help. I started this month's experiment on my own initiative with the idea of surprising my clients at the end of the month with the results. But about halfway through the month, I was like, “THIS SHIT’S HARD,” and told them what I was attempting and asked if they had any suggestions for posts.
I would also train team members in advance on the type of content I need. I can’t be out at the winery every day (I have other clients after all), so having other boots on the ground capturing content for me intentionally would be the tits.
The TL;DR
Posting daily is hard, but I think it can be worth it, especially if you feel like you’re in a rut. It forces you to look at things you might not otherwise post and find ways to make them cool for social media. It also forces you to be on the app more, which the algorithm likes.
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