3 weeks of #100daysofmarketing

I just passed Day 21 of my #100daysofmarketing challenge. It’s becoming a deep immersion, and I can’t stop thinking marketing, marketing, marketing.

I love that I’m obsessed now.

Pivoting myself

It’s not been easy for me when it comes to marketing. If coding was tough to learn, marketing is harder, because coding was more about overcoming the discomfort from learning something foreign and technical, but marketing comes with a lot of negative baggage to start with. Years of deep emotional narratives are harder to shift away from. So that fact that I can get obsessed about it, and even enjoy it a little, proves real changes are underway.

I’m realising that this #100daysofmarketing challenge isn’t really about the metrics at the end of the day. It’s about pivoting myself.

Even if I don’t do all that well metrics-wise at the end of all this fuss, I would be happy if I pivoted my identity.

Progress on Twitter

In other news, things had been looking up since I did a Twitter approach reset.

Switching to using my personal account for marketing is showing better metrics. Of course, it makes sense because my personal following is higher in the first place. But it isn’t just that - every reply I leave tends to get more replies and engagement, unlike the Lifelog account. That’s to be expected, because real people like interacting with real people, not brands.

Engagement rate is up from 2.4% last month to 3.3% this month, and September isn’t even over yet. Every day I get 1 or 2 new followers. I have a private Twitter List of writing accounts I follow, and I try to engage those accounts daily.

I can definitely do better in terms of tweeting out original content. My reflexes for retweeting and quote tweeting is so ingrained that I having to stop myself from doing it multiple times every day, but manageable so far.

What about Lifelog’s Twitter account?

The issue to think through right now is what am I going to do with the Lifelog account now that focus had shifted.

What kind of tweets and content should I be tweeting there?
Broadcasting or engaging - which stance should I take?
What category should I own?
What tone of voice should I take?

I think more original content about writing and goals. Threads, single tweets as the mainstay, RTs occasionally. I’ll take a more broadcasting stance, as a hub and archive of valuable content about *daily writing. No one owns that category, and I can fill that gap since that’s what a lot of my content is about – the mindsets, motivation and methods for daily writing, maintaining streaks, writing for the long haul. Tone of voice stays the same as my personal – informal, meme-y, fun, friendly, active.

Other channels

I’d been going strong on Medium, Quora, Facebook, posting daily, accumulating a store of value. Also found a home for my #decodingcoding writings on Dev.to and Hashnode, which I try to link back to Lifelog. Even got featured twice on Dev.to’s Twitter account – an unexpected pleasant surprise! But overall, it remains to be seen how these platforms will help with customer acquisition. After all, people who read my articles on these platforms are already writing on those platforms.

Why would they want to pay money to write on yet another one?

That would be one question that would quickly need an answer to. Metrics on these platforms so far are nothing to shout about, as is normal of anyone just starting out anew. I’m also learning a lot about how things work on these platforms, so I do expect it will take a while before the metrics pick up.

Overall, an A for effort

I would give myself an A so far for effort and consistency. Those are my strengths and I wouldn’t expect anything else. Performance wise, the jury is still out. After 3 weeks, the results are not stellar, just okay - a C+ perhaps. I’m optimistic it’ll get better, but also realistic enough that I might be wrong. At the end of 1 month, I’ll make a judgement call on that again.

We’ll see!