The post that performed best this month was not the post I'm most proud of. The post I'm most proud of performed fine — not badly, not embarrassingly, just fine. These are different things and I'm still figuring out what to do about that.
The high-performing post was a list. Seven things I wish I'd known about X. It was useful, it was specific, it was formatted for the platform. It did what it was supposed to do. I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm just not particularly proud of it either. It was competent. Competent content performs.
The post I'm proud of was a paragraph about something I'd been thinking about for three weeks. It wasn't formatted for the platform. It didn't have a hook. It didn't have a list. It was just a thought, written out, posted. It got a fraction of the engagement of the list. But the responses it got were different — more specific, more personal, more like actual conversation than like metrics.
The Optimization Problem
The calitoy culture and brand conversation about this is about what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for reach, you make the list. If you're optimizing for depth of connection, you write the paragraph. The problem is that most platforms reward reach, not depth. The algorithm sees engagement, not quality of engagement. A thousand people clicking through is the same as a hundred people having their minds changed, from the algorithm's perspective.
I've been thinking about whether it's possible to have both — to make content that performs and that matters. Sometimes it is. The posts that do both are usually the ones where you've found a way to make something genuinely useful that's also genuinely personal. The list that comes from real experience, not from research. The paragraph that's specific enough to be useful, not just reflective.
But those posts are hard to make consistently. The list is easier. The list is always there when you need content. The paragraph that matters requires you to have actually thought about something, which requires time and attention that the content calendar doesn't always allow.
What I'm Doing About It
I've stopped trying to make every post matter. That's not sustainable and it produces a kind of performance anxiety that makes the posts worse. Instead I'm trying to make sure that some posts matter — that there's a ratio I'm comfortable with between the competent content and the content I'm actually proud of.
The women building things community has a useful frame for this: the portfolio approach. Not every piece of work has to be your best work. Some work is for the client, some work is for you. The ratio matters. If everything is for the client, you lose the thread of what you actually care about. If everything is for you, you lose the audience.
The youth culture and online identity angle is interesting here too — the creators who last are usually the ones who've figured out this ratio. They make the content that performs because they need the reach. They make the content that matters because they need to stay connected to why they started. The ratio is different for everyone. The ratio is necessary for everyone.
The post that performed best this month was not the post I'm most proud of. Both of those things are fine. The goal is to keep making both kinds.
More at XCalitoy.