Social Media Experiments I'm Trying in 2025 (That Are Actually Working!)
2025 is my year of experimenting—and in this post (part 1 of a 2-part series!), I’m sharing exactly how I’m switching things up on social media. From new content formats on Instagram to rethinking engagement and storytelling, I’m walking you through what I’m testing right now and how it’s working. If you’ve been feeling stuck or uninspired with your content, I hope this gives you ideas and permission to play, pivot, and show up in ways that feel good to you.
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This year has been the year of experimentation and adapting. And it's so much easier to build momentum when you’re focused on one or two strategies or one or two platforms. You'll see that I remained focused on social media and email marketing because those are still the two marketing strategies that I use most. However, I have added to those different strategies to experiment and play around and just see what will land with my audience.
When you’re in a phase of trying to figure out what works for you, staying focused for 30, 60, 90 days is going to be crucial so that you have the data to go back to and look and see, did this actually work? Is there something that I can pivot and optimize and change? Often, it's not that something isn't working—it's just that you haven't optimized or adapted yet.
So many of us will post for a month on social media and think, “Well, that didn't work,” when in reality, you are just getting started. And now you have those 30 days of data to look at and optimize what you're doing. It's very rarely a fail—it's just a time for experimenting.
In the beginning of this year, I filmed a video about my 2025 Instagram strategy, and I've been sticking to it and experimenting with these different things. So, if you want to watch that original video, you can check it out here.
My Favorite Social Media Experiments This Year
1. Post Types
The very first thing that I've experimented more with is my post types. So, previously, reels were my strongest post type (my posts would get hundreds of thousands of views, if not millions of views). And this was during the time where reels were newer, and Instagram was really pushing them out as their focus.
Now, they're putting just as much emphasis on carousels, and we're seeing static images being able to get just as many shares and saves as a reel now. I'm actually seeing a flip where my static images and carousels are performing better than my reels. So, rather than continuing to post a bunch of reels, I've been changing up my strategy to focus more on images that I'm seeing my audience interact more with.
They're sending it to their friends, they're saving it to come back to later. But that being said, because my reels performance hasn't been quite as strong, I've been experimenting with different types of reels that I haven't done before or that I haven't done in years. For example, I've been showing up on camera more.
I really don't show my face all that often, but with some of the research that I've already shared with you on this channel about personal brands and how it's so important to show up, I've been wanting to do that more and more. So, I've been getting on camera, reading my poems out loud, giving inspirational kind of pep talks in my content, and experimenting just because I figure why not when things are a little bit lower for me right now?
2. Recurring Series
The next thing that I've been doing is recurring series (or the same types of posts) that I repeat every so often. For example, on my Marketing by Shelby account, we've been doing an affirmation every single Sunday to get you (and myself) inspired for the week. So, I give you a little affirmation about marketing, about getting visible, about being creative to reach a target audience.
And those have been performing pretty well. I did see a stronger performance in the first three or four when they were newer, and now that I've been posting them for a while, I think it's something that people have come to find. But I do think we need to change up the format of them because they're getting a little bit stale.
Also, for the last few months on my author page, every new month, I've been sharing a “Hello June” or “Hello July” type of post with some inspiration or affirmations for that month as well. These two things fit in really well with my brand and my content pillars.
So they might not work exactly for you, but thinking of something that you can repeat or kind of start to be known for maybe once a month or once a week can be really handy.
3. Storytelling
The next thing falls in line with storytelling, which I teach passionately because it's so important, as well as personal brand and trust-building that I've been talking about what feels like this whole year.
I've been doing storytelling more in carousels and allowing people to swipe through and read the story with some different supporting images, as well as video in carousels because we can now post actual video content in them. I've also been experimenting with sharing things that I might typically share in my stories on my feed instead because, again, we're seeing that people are looking for that authentic behind-the-scenes, raw content instead of the super filtered, perfect content.
Carousels are very behind-the-scenes casual in that way, so I'm just adding text within Instagram or within Canva. For example, I told a story that I normally would have kept to my Instagram stories (that disappear in 24 hours) where I went to this author event, and instead, I decided to post it on my feed—it was one of my top performing posts for that month, because people really resonated with it!
4. Free Resources
Next up is that I've been experimenting with more free resources and Manychat keywords to either get my audience to my email list or get them to comment more on my posts to boost my visibility. I've been using Manychat for well over a year now, but this year, I've tried to use it even more strategically than just getting people to comment a word and go to my email list.
For example, we've been using it to revitalize some of my older YouTube videos where I'll do a post about what the YouTube video topic was about and encourage people to comment a word where I will send them this free training—they don't even have to sign up for anything or give me their email address. So it's very accessible to them and it's helping to boost my YouTube channel views as well. I've also done this for my author page, where I've created some quick and easy free resources and people have commented to get those free resources.
And speaking of freebies, I have a few different free marketing resources currently available if you're interested. Just head to marketingbyshelby.com/free and get your hands on some free helpful marketing resources, which will also put you on my email list for marketing tips every Marketing Monday.
5. Celebrations
Which brings me to the next thing that I've been wanting to experiment with for years, and that is doing a week of activities around my birthday. Now, obviously you can do this any time of year, but I like the idea of a birthday week celebration. I wanted it to be really fun, something that would get my audience engaged and would help grow my email list as well.
I did this in two different ways, where I focused on social media and email marketing. I'm going to talk a little about the social media side of birthday week in this post, and then in the next post, I’ll talk about some of the new business strategies and email marketing strategies that I've been trying.
If you would like to hear more details about how I celebrated my birthday week with my community, just click to watch the corresponding YouTube video or podcast on the buttons under the picture at the top of the page.
If you're new to me, you should know that I have two different brands. I have my author brand and separate social media channels for that, and then I also have this brand, Marketing by Shelby, where I teach marketing to creatives. I did a birthday celebration for both brands this year, which was really fun.
I did a giveaway to help grow my email list and also get people engaged on social media. I did a carousel, announcing that I was doing a giveaway and giving away a stack of signed personalized books to one winner. And in order to win, they had to take a couple of steps, and I said that I would be announcing the winner on my email list. I think we got almost 100 new email subscribers just from that one post, which was really great.
On Marketing by Shelby, I did a few more things that lasted throughout the week. The giveaways got people really excited, as did knowing that there was more coming, because I led the week by letting people know in the caption that there was more to come. It was really fun and unique and something that I definitely would recommend that you try for yourself as well.
Another thing that we did for birthday week was a birthday sale. And I'm going to get into more of the details of what we did for this birthday sale in my next post, so make sure you check back here (or YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts) so you don't miss that one.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of different things I've been experimenting with and trying, and I hope that it has inspired you to try some new things yourself as well. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!