I spent a year experimenting with Instagram, building a small (very small) account, only to have people unfollow without a blink. Comments were few and mostly meaningless. Then I took a 6-month break and started posting un-edited sports and exercise videos on YouTube to keep myself motivated, and strangers started watching. More than on Instagram.
Struggling as a fitness trainer who works in tech
I am a fitness enthusiast (and fitness coach) who enjoys sharing tips for people who might be too bashful to step into a gym, try a sport, or buy gear for home exercise.
Getting dirty with outdoor sports is great fun, I assure you! Casual sports are a particularly passionate activity for me. I’ve studied fitness and health, I worked in health (I don’t anymore), and I struggle a bit when trying to balance type 1 diabetes and celiac disease, a career, and starting a blog (and coaching business). Then there’s my endless pursuit of intense hobbies like video games, game development, fiction, and illustration.
I love Apple Fitness and Daily Yoga app on my phone, plus all sorts of home exercise equipment. I rarely go to a gym these days. I’m more likely to be found in a basketball court, tennis court, or out on the trails running or biking. Or any of the wheeled sports like skateboarding.
So I am on YouTube to encourage strangers to exercise. Even just a bit. My day job doesn’t get me moving. But my weekends and evenings are FULL of activity! Thus I naturally feel like sharing my own antics plus tips for strangers tempted to try exercising more in new ways.
There is that one odd thing about me…
The one thing you may not find in your typical fitness trainer is this: I’ve also had several injuries from motorcycling and hockey accidents. I spent over 6 months learning to walk again twice in adulthood. I still have scars, a finger that’s un-bendable, and several toes that look…out of place. There’s whole section of one leg that I can’t feel.
It’s no big deal now, but my first bike accident was a huge deal while I was aiming for straight-A’s and scholarships in college. The scholarships never came. Instead, I got:
- A general degree with no science component, and no math – I’ve hustled to get into tech but it took nine years to get my degree and another 7 years to get hired in a permanent position
- A hand that doesn’t make a fist, so I learned alternate boxing methods
- Toes that don’t bend – and this led to my interest in roller skating because toes don’t need to bend when they’re in skates!
- A 25-year-old scar on my right leg – if you run your finger along it, I feel an electrical sensation about two inches to the side. Weird, huh?
- Recently, the arch in my right foot is finally visible – and it has wrinkles again!
- But I still can’t wear high heels, darn
Taking passions online the Instagram way
I enjoyed working with Instagram’s platform when I first wanted to pursue social media, but got tired of following a schedule to share my impromptu fun content. Instagram rewards participants that post on a schedule. And if you miss a day, back when I was active there, it caused your posts to be seen by less people.
The harder I tried, the worse my reach got. Meanwhile, I was starting a new job and my most meaningful activities (sports and arts) dwindled. Instagram users weren’t seeing my posts consistently. Social media gurus say you gain your initial fans at any platform by first focusing deep on one topic.
That won’t work for me.
I ended up with four Instagram accounts because I had four topics I enjoyed sharing photos and videos about. Each was clearly focused. None took off. The app was a little difficult to navigate between accounts, as well. I posted daily in each, and I practiced the craft or sport of each regularly.
Today, two of my Instagram accounts have not lost followers, and two have dwindled almost to zero. The winners were focused on music and art, and the losers were about video gaming and fitness.
My new YouTube experiments
While doing all that Instagram for a year, I also had an old YouTube account lying dormant. I posted a few of my passions there without much thought over ten years ago:
- A class project that had to be posted online for a university art class
- Tryouts of new art supplies that were expensive and I thought other people might benefit from seeing them in action
- Attempts at my clumsy post-accident roller skating
- A review of my roller skates eventually got over 5,000 views!
I used to love making roller skating videos. I wish I hadn’t stopped skating and filming myself.
Current YouTube snapshot
In the past few months, I updated my channel to focus on fitness, but my old art videos are still there. It’s not so easy to move them to another account or channel now.
Basically, YouTube hasn’t penalized me so far with posting what I feel like, when I feel like it. I think it helps to post about once every week or two, even if not on a schedule. It seems like my posts do get shown to people even when I don’t post often. Thanks, YouTube!
My posting routine right now
I try to post on my blog every Wednesday, mainly to provide tips and background about myself so that later if someone wants to follow my tips or ends up getting value from my video content, they’ll know I’m a real person.
I post my YouTube content usually in the first few days of the week, when I have the time to examine my weekend activities’ footage. That way, I can embed the YouTube links in my blog post.
Pick a platform then forget perfection
Anyone who posts videos online knows that the process can be unforgiving. Any platform can be unforgiving. There are some really high quality accounts out there, bringing audience expectations up. Accounts can get removed if you break important rules. Comments can be annoying to remove if they are off-topic or nonsense (I get a lot of spam myself).
If you do anything wrong, you just won’t get views.
On YouTube, particularly shorts (videos in vertical format and under 2 minutes), you can still get views. Content there doesn’t have to be polished. It just needs to capture attention and add some value to the audience’s lives, so they stay long enough for YouTube to notice. Then you get more views.
For reference, Instagram “Reels” is similar to YouTube shorts. I never posted Reels because I had already struggled to get my main account (the art one) going and I didn’t have video content to try Reels out with. My fitness account at Instagram just didn’t have a large-enough following to bother with video. I should’ve tried video anyway. Now I know!
I think for me, YouTube has the audience figured out in a way that works for me. I can post a variety of sports, and some sports nuts will see them. I can post an explanation or personal thoughts and some strangers will see it. Some stay a short time, but rarely to the end. I’m still working on that.
Keep in mind, too, that YouTube is an entirely video-based platform. Video or nothing.
Instagram instead offers a choice – initially I posted only photos there, until I tried posting videos of my music-making sessions and was surprised to get some views.
Comparison of YouTube vs Instagram
For me, YouTube is fast becoming my favourite tool for sharing content. I’ve even gotten a few conversations started off-site with people who cheered me on.
Where Instagram was polished, YouTube can be impromptu as long as it offers value to the audience.
Where Instagram allows 30 hashtags per post and suits posts that have a consistent format, YouTube posts can have honest feelings in the description because people are searching for that on YouTube. Hashtags aren’t as popular there, I guess because it’s already built around an effective search engine.
Unboxing and demonstrating products worked better for me on YouTube, by far.
If you’ve got long videos, you need YouTube.
Educational videos suit YouTube.
People tend to seek entertainment, laughter, and shocking content on Instagram.
People tend to actively search for information, explanations, product demonstrations, tips, tutorials, and techniques on YouTube.
Exercise videos, computer tutorials, game walkthroughs, and fine art demonstrations are easy to find on YouTube. There’s still room to fit into narrow segments of these very popular topics and many others.
Lifestyle and success accounts do very well on Instagram, according to my advisors over recent years. Cute kittens and puppies too. Daredevil stunts, hip hop dance, crazy skateboard tricks are easy to find on Instagram – they fit well there in short video formats and hashtags help you find more.
Instagram is great for unexpectedly seeing posts of cute kittens, parkour, hang gliding, cooking miniature food in a miniature stove, and other things you don’t initially try to search for but are very, very fun.
If you’re the one doing the posting, Instagram can be hard in some ways – a different type of hard than YouTube. You see, if your topic is something like fitness demonstrations or computer tutorials like I’d likely be inspired to create, you can bet people are searching for those topics AND narrow edge cases too. So to get a following and fan base, you can try to post content on YouTube that answers the questions or problems in those narrow topics and edge cases.
I’m working on that myself but also aiming for fun and some degree of consistency as well.
What’s your go-to platform for sharing?
Even though I’m currently pro-YouTube, I’ll still use Instagram. I’m using lessons learned from YouTube to plan and guide my content options. In the past two to three months, I’ve developed a habit of always being ready to film my activities, and now the path forward looks more clear.
I need more experiments on YouTube! I’m learning how imperfect videos can still reach the right people.
As I gain views, of course I’m also seeking fans. That’s a lesson I still need to learn.