Should You Start A New Instagram or Use Your Personal One? What the Data Says

An experiment that made it easy to determine whats right for me

As I started to plunge head first into the creator economy it became clear that short form video content is a huge opportunity.

With the rise of tiny cameras that also make phone calls in our pockets, people’s attention spans have gone to zero. So not only has video become more important for getting your message across, but SHORT FORM video is a huge way people are learning and discovering things.

Instagram, in addition to Youtube and Tiktok, is obviously a key player.

I had been using instagram for a decade for my personal account which I rarely if ever posted too, so I was a bit uncomfortable at the idea of all a sudden bombing videos to my family and friends about esoteric spiritual concepts that I write about on my other substack.

Nonetheless, I knew I had to take the plunge if I was really going to give this creator thing a go and the idea of starting from scratch vs. 2,000 followers made my personal account the logical place to start.

The place where all the action is on Instagram is reels.

Reels are the videos you’ve probably seen on someone’s feed that can be anywhere from 0-1:30 seconds. You can also view them in the reels section of the app.

To Bomb Friends With My Interests or Not To Bomb?

I wasn’t so interested in bombing my feed, but learned that you could actually just publish content to just the reels section and maintain your once a year wedding photo asesthetic if you wanted.

This sounded like the perfect option for me so I decided to run an experiment over the course of 2 weeks.

I began by publishing 1 video a day using buffer because I like working on my computer better. On buffer, there is a toggle that you can click to make sure the reel only posts on your reels and not your feed.

Unbeknownst to me since I didn’t check my account the first few days, there was actually a bug in buffer where this didn’t work. So for the first 4 days, all my posts were going to both my feed and the reels section.

Here you can see the videos appearing next to my once a year big moment posts on my normal feed. F%$k!

Once I found out this happened, I started to publish my videos directly from my phone which allowed for the reels to only be published in reels section.

When I did this, I expected the videos to go down slightly, but I had no idea that everything would plummet the way that it did.

The first video where I did Reels only you can see “First Reels Only” label. Moving right to left you can see that the views and engagement absolutely plummet.

Some creators and marketers like to say things like “its all about the quality of the video that determines views,” but I have everything from professionally edited videos to ones I shot on my phone on here and for this use cases it doesn’t seem to be the primary variable.

This trend only continued throughout the remainder of the 2 weeks.

I came to the realization that I was either going to have to create a new account or turn my personal instagram that often sparked intimate conversations with family and friends into a talking head reel if I wanted anyone to see my content.

I decided to create a new account. 

Here are the first posts I published with literally 1 follower to both the reels section AND my feed. 

It’s clear that the engagement is way better when posting to reels and your feed even though I had 1/200th the following on this new account.

So what does this mean?

Unless your cool with basically kissing your curated personal instagram experience goodbye, you should probably create a new account. 

Even though it might seem like more work, separating your creator content and personal life is weirdly a more simplified approach that aligns with my preferences as someone who doesn’t consume it much.

Any headstart that I would have gotten is far outweighed by allowing people in my personal life to opt-into this type of content on a new profile vs. just blowing up their feed.

Here’s what I did to my personal network and this resulted in about 30 people in my personal network signing up for the new stuff. 

Now how do we grow from this small base? I have a few ideas and experiments I’m actively running. If that sounds interesting sign up for here!