If you know me, you know I’m not shy about wearing sequined jackets to work in the morning in the middle of April or metallic boots to the dentist. My closet looks like I might be a lounge singer with a nightly gig at the Golden Nugget. Over drinks with colleagues last month, I joked about wearing a sparkly outfit every day in the month of December and documenting it on Instagram. The more I thought about it (and the more they egged me on), the more I decided it would be a fun, silly thing to do, and here I am on Day 29 of 31 of “Sparkle & Shimmer✨ outfits” all posted on my Instagram account.

Although I have a couple days left, I’ve already learned several things from this weird exercise that are worth sharing – some related to marketing and others related to myself. Here we go: 
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Three Marketing Takeaways 

1. More posting ≠ more engagement. As a person who’s worked in social media for a long time, I knew this was true, but it was educational to actually observe it on my own account. More posting doesn’t mean more engagement, and in fact, the more you post, the less engagement you’ll probably get. My first few posts got a ton of likes. Considering that I don’t post often on the grid (I’m a queen of Instagram Stories), when I do post, I usually get a decent number of hearts. After a few days, though, the likes totally fell off. This is how Meta’s algorithms work, which leads to #2 …
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2. Instagram’s algorithm is frustrating. My account is private, and I personally approve any follower requests so I wasn’t sure how the algorithm would respond to my suddenly posting daily content that feels intended for a broader public. Had I really been trying to grow the reach of my account, I’d have unlocked it and used strategic, popular hashtags. That wasn’t my goal, and my best guess is that my content was not prioritized for a broader audience even among the 440 people who follow me. You see actual influencers with public accounts complain about this all the time, too, though, so I really believe Instagram prioritizes paid content on the grid; its algorithm probably constantly looks for the new and novel (or better yet, new and novel from a massive celebrity), making it impossible for even established brands to always post hits.
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3. Quality content (still) matters. The posts where I used decent lighting, prettier colors or clever video performed better than the ones of outfits shot in the 100-year-old speckled mirrors on the back of the closet doors in my house. If you’re serious about growing your social following, find (or purchase) better light for your videos and photos and think about how to make your posts more compelling to your audience. 

Four Personal Takeaways

1. I don’t hate how I look. Although I’ve embraced body positivity for a long time, I admit I hadn’t applied it to myself. Most of my life, I’ve cringed at myself in photos, picking at all aspects of my appearance and generally feeling bad about how my clothes fit. Over the past year or so, I’ve worked pretty hard to stop this unproductive nonsense (which is basically a TED talk in and of itself, so I’ll spare you the details today). Posting outfits on Instagram forced me to take body positivity to a new level, and guess what? It might have actually helped. Filming and seeing my own body wearing different clothes in different settings, on video and still photos was surprisingly kind of empowering. Plus, seeing photos or videos of myself every day also had this weird normalizing effect. After a few posts, I stopped focusing on all the things that were wrong with me and started seeing (literally) the entire picture.
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2. To quote the great Lizzo: If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine.Dressing up in sparkles was a mood-lifter for me, but I didn’t expect (or notice when I previously went out dressed as a disco ball) that it seemed to brighten a lot of other people’s moods, too. I got a lot of smiles, compliments and “Look how festive you are!” when I was out and about. Even better, a lot of my friends on Instagram said they loved and looked forward to my daily posts. 🥹❤️ I hope they see how much they shine, too.
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3. Social media can be fun. You might have forgotten (I did), but it isn’t just about shopping and being influenced or people posting their perfect lives or politics and protest or consumer engagement or complaining about things that upset you. I really enjoyed the playfulness and creativity of creating the 31 sparkly outfit posts. I liked posing in different ways, adding relevant music to the videos, writing whatever was on my mind in the captions and just generally having a good time with the project. If more people approached social media as a space to play, I am certain we’d all be a lot less stressed out by it. 
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4. Social media can also be tiring. Creating daily posts – or at least half-way decent ones – isn’t easy. December was dark (in all kinds of ways, but right now I mean literally dark), and I often forgot to take a photo of my outfit before the 4:30 p.m. sunset, which meant figuring out how to better light the shots. And even though putting together new outfits was fun, it also required thought and a little minor closet cleaning. 
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   Even though I’m certainly going to continue breaking out the glitter and shimmer from time to time in the coming months and years, I’ll be fine with not having to think about it as much. I’ll certainly be good without recording what I’m wearing every day. 
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Having said that, I’m already thinking about the dozens of scarves in my collection and how 90 days of scarf posts would force me to wear them. Honestly, they could probably have their own Instagram account. 

Here we go again.

— Shayla Thiel-Stern, Uncommon Teal