Does posting every day on social media actually work?

In T.D. Orel's experience, not on its own. He posted every day for 14 months without missing a day and averaged around 12 likes a video, one comment from his mom, and maybe 2,000 followers. He also argues daily posting works against quality, since you will not have an excellent idea every day. What moved his numbers was changing what he posted, not how often.

Orel gave it 14 months, which was longer than the advice he had been given. He says people used to tell him that by about the eight month mark you would have 10,000 followers. He does not offer a cutoff date. What he describes instead is looking hard at his own feed, where he could see the reason it was failing.

Orel's answer is that likes were not the signal that mattered for him. His first successful video got likes and comments, but what he noticed was a ton of shares, and the shares were what shifted his account. He connects sharing to people wanting to prove they recognized a reference.

Orel argues it is, and the line he keeps returning to is that if you make something for everyone, it is really for no one. His example is a video about one scene in a 1,200-page fantasy novel, content almost nobody outside that readership could follow, which got around 200,000 views and a large number of shares. He was initially scared to post it for exactly that reason.

Orel's explanation is that we all have a deep desire to feel like we are part of some sort of exclusive club, and then we love bragging about being part of it. When viewers understood the reference in his video, they reshared it to their stories with captions like "if you know, you know." This is his read on his own shares and comments rather than a study.

Orel deliberately decided not to buy a fancy camera, take classes or hire a coach. The videos that carried him past 100,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok were filmed in his room on an iPhone 12 in lighting he describes as terrible. Nick notes that a few months earlier, when they met, Orel was somewhere in the 20,000s.

Orel says he heard over and over, from no one in particular, that you would never get an agent without 10,000 followers, and he calls that a lie he sold himself. He has never seen an agent's query form ask for a follower count outright, though they do ask you to link your socials and are open about wanting to see that you are involved and engaged in the community. He adds that for nonfiction a bigger following is far more compelling to an agent than it is for fiction, and says he does not entirely understand why.

Orel's two examples are persistence and effort that is hard to ignore. He tagged Pierce Brown every day asking him to be his mentor until Brown replied around day 22, and he built a puzzle box by hand for Christopher Paolini with the combination hidden across his videos, which got him an email back. He frames both as things nobody in his space was doing, and says the worst case is that someone says no or humiliates you.