Daily vlogging is something I’ve always wanted to try. I love coming up with random ideas, challenges and experiments and my latest experiment was to create 100 vlogs in 100 days.
The idea was to post them on my Facebook page to see what happened with my page growth, my post reach and various other things.
On 1st August 2016, I filmed the first of 100.
In this article I’m going to share exactly what happened.
What happens when you vlog daily for 100 days?
It’s been such an interesting experiment. Not only because I’ve learned a lot of different things, but because I now have a snapshot of my year and my life running a business. I’ll be able to look back on my vlogs in 5,10,20+ years and see what I was thinking on a daily basis. It’s really cool to have (almost) a third of my year documented. Some notable things that happened during the challenge:
- I moved house
- I went home to Shetland 3 times
- Spoke in Edinburgh, London & Frankfurt
- My brother got married
- I was featured on Virgin.com
- I released my first ever paid course
- I’ve found out a lot about myself, my brand and where I want to take the business
- I’ve found a real love for creating video content
I learned a lot both personally and also from a data point of view. Let’s talk about the data first and what I experienced in terms of my Facebook page stats:
What happened on Facebook?
- Page Growth – The page grew pretty steadily from 238 to 431 likes. There was no real promotion involved in the vlogs (as I wanted to test the organic growth). This sort of growth seems like a good rate to me. The page is still very small – I only created it a few months ago and so I wasn’t expecting any huge growth.
- Reach – I found my reach stats really interesting. From day one, my reach slowly started to decrease until the end of September. I then had my most popular video – a rant about entrepreneurs – which spiked my reach. It then started to slowly increase until the end of the challenge!
- Enquiries – The number of enquiries or messages I got to the page definitely increased. I can’t put a figure or a percentage on it. I also had a lot of people say things like “I’ve seen some of your videos on Facebook” when they emailed/phoned me. So in terms of real business results – it definitely helped.
- Worst performing video – Interestingly, the worst performing video was one where I spoke about KPI’s. It got a reach of 100-200 or something very small.
- Paid promotion – I didn’t spend much on boosting the posts as I wanted to keep an eye out on the organic side of things. However over the 100 days, I spent something nominal like £10 just to give certain videos a little boost – typically if I posted them late at night or at a time people weren’t online.
- Video Views – My video views stayed consistent throughout the 100 days.
What did I learn personally?
- Confidence – I’ve definitely become more confident in front of the camera. Being confident in front of the camera is something I always struggled with. I’ve always fallen into the perfection trap too – trying to take perfect shots. With the challenge I decided that I was just going to shoot once and upload straight away. I forgot about going for perfection. It was nerve-wracking at first but you soon get over it!
- Braver – I’ve become a lot braver and have a lot more clarity on the type of content I want to create and share
- Forced to be creative – I was forced to create something every day. Even on the days I had nothing special to share, or didn’t feel like filming a video, I had to be disciplined enough to get something out there. It forced me to be creative.
- Focus – I found the videos in which I documented my journey got the most traction. Ones where I shared personal stories or anecdotes, rather than talking about Facebook advertising, for example. This helped me to focus on being aware of what I was doing.
What I’d do next time
- Be more prepared. Being more prepared would allow me to have more structure to the whole challenge. I decided to do the challenge on the Friday and filmed the first one on Monday – without any real thought or structure. I didn’t plan any of the vlogs in advance – they were all off the cuff. This meant that sometimes I felt like I was sharing something just for the sake of sharing something.
- I’d actually spend time promoting and distributing the content I created. I could have done things such as creating a specific hashtag for the challenge. Distribution is everything. Saying that, it was never my plan to promote the content I created.
- I’d maybe look at focusing on the quality of the video a little bit more. I said before the challenge that I didn’t care about quality and it was just a case of filming and uploading. But there were times I had to do video outside in the dark (as I’d forgotten to do one) and the quality wasn’t there at all.
Next steps
I’m going to take some time to evaluate the content I want to share on my Facebook page and Youtube channel. The daily vlogs will end. I’m considering what the next challenge will be so if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!
And lastly, I just want to say a huge thanks to everyone that liked, commented and shared my vlogs. Your support is much appreciated! But now I want to see you do some filming 😉
If you’d like to have a look back over my vlogs, you can visit my Facebook page, or my Youtube channel.
Check out my Entrepreneurs Guide To Vlogging Equipment, too!
Gavin
