↪️ The Weekly Scroll: Pivooot!
↪️ The Weekly Scroll: Pivooot!The real reason I stayed off Instagram for a decade had nothing to do with strategy.
Quick heads up: we’re off on our annual retreat next week, so the Weekly Scroll will be back in two weeks. OK, on to the good stuff. I have a small confession. A few weeks ago, when I told you I was growing on Instagram, I left a piece of the story out. While I was over there making videos and crossing 2,000 followers, I was also falling behind on another experiment. Since November, I’ve been running a series called Proof of Concept on the Buffer blog. I pick a platform, set a goal, and try to grow from scratch in front of the thousands of blog (and now newsletter) readers. I started with Threads, aiming for 1,000 followers by December 15, 2025. I got to But my recent wins on Instagram made me realize two things: I had been avoiding Instagram for 10 years, and two, it was time to tap into my millennial side and pivot the platform I was running Proof of Concept on.
I’ll leave the tactical stuff for the article, but today, I want to talk about the psychology behind the pivot. 👉 I’m Growing on Instagram After 10 Years — Here’s What I‘m Doing Differently The pivot (or lack thereof) was not about strategyHere’s what I wrote in the article, kind of tucked in where I knew people might skim past it: I didn’t want the friends and family already following me on there to watch me try (and possibly fail) at something new. That is a ridiculous reason to write off a platform for 10 years. I told myself, “Instagram’s just not the right place for me.” But what I was actually doing was running away from the platform I’d built the right kind of fluency in — 10 years of watching reels, saving photo dumps, noticing which sounds hit. The funny thing is, the moment I actually posted, the people in my life were simply nice about it. Supportive, even. And the people who didn’t know me at all watched the video without judgment. The reasons I used to stay away were, in the end, a non-issue. But I still needed something external to get me to this point. Which brings me to the first thing I think a good pivot requires. Thanks for reading The Weekly Scroll! Subscribe to receive new posts every week. Pivots need a deus ex machinaIf you have no idea what that is, a deus ex machina is a trope in theatre where a god is lowered onto the stage by a crane to suddenly resolve an impossible situation. In my case, the god is usually an unexpected external event — a viral post, a flopped experiment, an opportunity that lands in my lap — that essentially makes the decision for me. With Threads, the deus ex machina came from outside the experiment entirely. I’d been posting consistently for six months, getting close to my goal, and still wondering whether I was on the right platform. Then I crossposted a LinkedIn video to Instagram on a whim, watched it hit 110,000 views, and suddenly the decision made itself. I think a lot of us do this, and there’s actually a psychological reason for it. Behavioral economists have a name for the particular flavor of stuck I was in: loss aversion. The pain of letting go of what you’ve already built — the 824 Threads followers, the six months of posting, the sunk cost of it all — tends to feel about twice as heavy as the excitement of what could come next. Which means we need an external signal big enough to tip the scales. For me, 110,000 views tipped it. And this, it turns out, is not just a me thing. It’s a Silicon Valley thing, too. Instagram itself was a pivot — it started as a location check-in app called Burbn, until its founders noticed users only really engaged with the photo-sharing features and doubled down. Slack came out of a failed video game. Twitter came out of a podcast startup that got squeezed by iTunes. Eric Ries calls a pivot “a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis,” which is a pretty generous description of what actually happens most of the time. Most of the time, the hypothesis has been quietly brewing for years in the data, in your head, in your feed — and we’re just waiting for permission to stop ignoring it. Which, as it turns out, is only the first thing a pivot asks of you. Pivots need commitmentWhat surprised me most in the days after I made the call to switch to Instagram was the jump in the quality of my content. It was almost immediate, and just as a result of framing everything as “this is for Instagram” rather than thinking of it as just general video content. For a while there, I’d been crossposting my LinkedIn videos and text posts to TikTok and Threads (never Instagram, though) just to fulfill a creator obligation. It never really worked because I wasn’t focused on fitting the content to the platform. What I was actually doing, I can see now, was half-pivoting. Not enough to get real results, just enough to let me tell myself I’d tried. The moment I actually committed and started making things specifically for Instagram, it started working almost embarrassingly fast. We talk about pivots like a moment of decision — a fork in the road where you pick a direction. But a pivot only really works when you fully commit to the new direction. A half-pivot is just hedging, and hedging is usually why things weren’t working in the first place. Committing got me through the first few weeks of the new direction. But if I’ve learned anything from 10 years of watching other creators pivot, it’s that the real work is only just beginning. Pivots need follow-throughIt’s cute to narrate my journey through common storytelling terms like deus ex machina or the hero’s journey. But if my life really were a play, the viral video would just be the middle of Act One. Most of what happens from here is going to be less dramatic: showing up, making things, adjusting, making things again. This quote by Picasso comes to mind:
The deus ex machina got me to act. The commitment got me through the first few weeks. The follow-through is what matters now; it’ll be less dramatic and less narratable, but it's the only way to know whether I’ll achieve this goal. I have a feeling it’ll be less linear than I’m imagining, but I’ll have fun with it regardless. What’s something you’ve been putting off that you have a sneaky suspicion would go very well for you? Hit reply, or drop it in the comments — I’m genuinely curious. CROSSPOSTING WITH BUFFER The video that started this whole pivot was a crosspost. I made it for LinkedIn, posted it to Instagram on a whim, and the rest is this week’s essay. Crossposting without a tool would have meant opening four apps and manually uploading four times — which is exactly the kind of friction that keeps people from experimenting. Buffer lets me post to every channel from one place, which means I actually try things. If you want the same, scheduling is free for up to three channels. Give Buffer a try here! WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL? First, I invite you to follow us on Instagram so all the content we’ll be sharing over retreat week pops up in your scroll! Speaking of Instagram, it’s all over my feed this week for the obvious reasons and then some. Discover Sabreen’s top tips for making money on Instagram in the latest blog post. Then, if you’ve been wanting to switch up your algorithm, we have a tutorial for that. And finally, steal the guide I’ve been using to lean into Instagram Stories a bit more in my own content. In social news, it’s been a quiet week, but Threads caught my eye with live chats, which will function like Instagram Broadcast Channels. Plus, Instagram is introducing an app called Instants to share disappearing photos with friends a la BeReal (or stories???) Anyway, that’s it from me — see you in two weeks! — Tami Sr. Content Creator
|
