Social media experiments 🚀
I recently launched something new called IDC: I Don't Code. It's a series of short one minute videos, each about a coding-related topic or term. You can watch the first episode about APIs on just about every platform, but the format is definitely optimal for Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The main concept is to teach anyone that doesn't come from a technical background but is curious to learn about some of these terms that are used in the industry.
With social media being the main form of content consumption these days, it is difficult to promote long-form content such as podcasts, articles, or even long videos. My favorite content creator and entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, does a spectacular job of reposting his long-form content as short valuable clips. This is something that I need to do as well, but I also have been thinking about a content series that would be native to social media. Instead of being limited by the max video length of platforms like Instagram, I would use it to my advantage.
Of course with any idea, execution is key, because otherwise the idea will remain unfinished. Gary recently made a video where he was having a conversation with someone who wanted to grow his brand and business. What advice did he give? To experiment more on social media, especially early on. Go crazy, try new things, see what works and what doesn't. The negative or lack of feedback that you may get on one idea just means that you need to quickly iterate on the next one. The great part about growing a brand is that you have time, whereas growing a business requires you to make decisions based on what will earn you money more quickly.
So a simple nudge is all I needed to start a poll about the IDC series to get an initial reaction of how these videos might do, and then finally I just recorded one in my car after work and edited the footage later that night. The next day, I published to Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I received more organic views and personal feedback than I ever have on anything that I've ever posted in the past.
We're not talking crazy numbers here of course, but I just wanted to share this story of how achieving your goal is a crazy long journey of constant iteration and improvement. I've learned a lot from from doing audio, video, blogging, and my other social media experiments such as Future Code Tips and Code Quotes.
In case you don't already, here are all the places where I've posted the first IDC episode so far:
I will also be uploading it to my YouTube channel very soon.
Hope this was somewhat interesting. I feel like there are many lessons that I learn through my journey of creating content and code which I hope others can learn from as well. Your support and personal thanks are always appreciated!
🗂 Tab Dump
- ⏯️ AudioCard - The React audio player designed for podcasts and Twitter cards
- Pushing Design & Code Down the Priority List - An interesting write-up and discussion from Chris Porter.
- useAnimations - Animated icons in Lottie Framework and After Effects for immediate implementation to your apps or websites
- common-tags - 🔖 Useful template literal tags for dealing with strings in ES2015+
📅 Updates
Besides IDC of course, I did a few other things this week:
- Republished my favorite design resources article to DEV.
- Had a great response to my thoughts on computer science as part of the #CodeNewbie discussion on Twitter.
- Streamed on Twitch building out the new dashboard search functionality for IronMic.
This upcoming week will probably be more coding focused as I share the work that I'm doing on IronMic. Hope to release a new feature update and then start work on a bunch of upgrades for the v2.
See you next Sunday, same inbox? 👋