Don’t Set the Wrong Baseline
The Amplified Impact Podcast
December 21st, 2023
Let’s talk social media reality…I share this cool story about a content creator who soared, then suddenly slowed down.
Ever thought a high point was the new normal? Yeah, me too.
Sometimes, we mistake those peaks for the way forward.
But life isn’t always high fives and fireworks.
It’s about rolling with the punches and keeping at it.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
Success isn’t about how much you get done, it’s about what you get done.
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
So I’m cruising around on LinkedIn this morning and I come across this post from a woman who had been posting content for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years. I’ve been doing it for a long time. And after that many years of consistently posting content, I think she said her following was maybe like six, 7000 subscribers or followers or something like that. And so on the one hand, you might look at that if you’re just starting off and you have like zero followers, you want to be a content creator, you want to be a personal brand, you might look at 6000 subscribers and think, wow, that’s amazing. For her, however, after that many years of posting content consistently, she did not think that was very good. That’s not where she wanted to be. And so in October, she started taking a different approach, started being a little bit more intentional with how she was creating, putting out content. And something kind of interesting happened.
Her account sort of blew up. And over the next 45 days she went from, I think, six or 7000 followers to around 13,000. I think she’s right at 13,000. So in the last two months, she has effectively not quite doubled, but nearly doubled over what she had done in the previous number of years. And so you look at that and you’d think that’s amazing, you’re doing something right. Just keep doing that thing and you will keep growing and it’s going to be fantastic. And Haza, well, an interesting thing happened, which is that growth, that explosive growth that she saw in that October November period, it started to slow down. And for whatever reason, her content just stopped hitting quite as hard.
It wasn’t getting as much engagement, as many comments, it wasn’t getting as many subscribers to convert. And so she posted the day and she’s like, what’s happening? I don’t understand. Did something change with the algorithm? Is anybody else experiencing this as well? And I was thinking about it and it’s just really interesting because this happens all the time. A number of things happen here. First is the algorithm didn’t change. First of all, we always think that when we find some success and we get some traction and then it starts to slow down, we start to think, oh, the algorithm, the algorithm. It’s not the algorithm. Let me just tell you that we had a very similar thing happen in the last year on YouTube for us.
We had been making content for many years, had 200 subscribers, and then as of last October, so about a year and a half ago, we started taking a different approach with the content more high intention, more story driven. And we saw explosive growth. We went from like 200 subscribers to 140,000 subscribers in like nine months, which is insane. Now, if you were to continue extrapolating out that growth, we would have hit like a million subscribers in the next year. And that becomes this baseline expectation that we judge the success or failure of our content off of. And that’s not fair, that’s not realistic, because what we’re doing is we’re using the high watermark or high score as the new baseline. And if we look at everything that we do, as through the lens of big data statistics, that everything reverts to the mean, that you’re going to have these volatile periods where you’re above the mean, then it’s going to have periods where you’re below the mean. And over time, your goal is to condense those and to slowly increase the baseline, but it’s unlikely that you’re ever going to see a volatile peak.
And then that becomes the new baseline. And I see this over and over again, not just in social media and building audiences, but also in my businesses, where you would have these incredible months of sales and revenue. And then you start to think that’s going to be the new norm. You start to expect that the high score becomes the new norm. And when it doesn’t, you start to wonder, well, what am I doing wrong? Well, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just reverting back to the mean. And it’s a slow, grinding process to continue raising it. But one of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to expect that that watermark, that high score, is the new baseline.
And if you get too comfortable expecting that, then you’re going to be disappointed when inevitably it dips back below, because that is what’s going to happen. That’s just how statistics and probabilities and big numbers work. And then over time, if you keep going with it, you’ll see more peaks, more values, more peaks, more values. And over time, that will go up into the right. That’s the goal, at least. But I just find it really interesting because I have been there, too. And here’s the thing, there’s no judgment when you’re going through those peaks, those high points. It’s euphoric, and you just kind of expect this always to be the thing that lasts.
And this is the same reason we see bubbles in investing. People have a hard time imagining that this is ever going to end and it becomes the new normal, the new expectation. And then when it implodes, as it will eventually do. They’re taken by surprise and they think, oh, I’ve done something wrong. You haven’t necessarily done anything wrong. You’re still doing all the right things. You just need to continue doing them on a long enough time frame and on a long enough time frame, all of those peaks and valleys, all that volatility, it smooths out and it becomes a pretty smooth line up into the right, assuming that you keep doing the thing. If you don’t, then it’s going to go down into the right, which is not the goal.
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