I finally saw how a meme page blew up in real time at a coffee shop in Austin

I was grabbing a latte at this spot on South Congress last Saturday and overheard two guys planning out a whole Instagram strategy for a local food truck. They were literally timing posts to when people would be bored at work and testing captions with the barista. One of them pulled up a spreadsheet on his laptop showing exactly which hashtags got them 10k new followers in a week. It kinda creeped me out how calculated it all was. Has anyone else noticed how many viral moments are actually just really good planning?

2 comments

2 Comments

kelly3852d ago

Take it from someone who's watched a lot of these things unfold: most of what looks spontaneous is just solid timing and audience research. They knew that food truck crowd would be scrolling at 2pm on a Tuesday, so they stacked posts for that exact window. Your mileage may vary, but I've seen the same spreadsheet approach work for everything from local bands to small clothing brands.

willow1142d ago

I ran a little pop-up bakery out of my apartment for two years and the only thing that saved me was scheduling posts for Wednesday afternoons at 3:15. Every single week I'd put up a photo of whatever crazy flavor I was trying, and it got way more hits than my Saturday morning posts ever did. I think the timing thing is real because people are just zoning out at work around that time and looking for something to distract them. It's not glamorous but a calendar and a few notes on when your audience actually checks their phone beats guessing every time. Did you ever try moving your posts to a different hour and see a big jump?