I began a new social media project on January 1, 2026 called Layouts I Love. After working on it for a month, here are some things I’ve learned, and some of the reasons for my decisions.
Why did I change all my social media to “Layouts I Love”?
I was lacking confidence in what I was doing on social media. My “strategy” was to pretend like social media was still like it was 15 years ago: personal, small, and communicative. That’s just not the landscape anymore. My opinion of that is two things happened at the same time: algorithmic feeds incentivize more attention-seeking posts, and group chats took over personal space. That leaves the public feed to be a weird place for someone with nothing to sell.
I’ve been inspired, however, by people sharing things they love. Turning social media into show and tell feels like a pretty good way to combat doomscrolling. I was inspired by Gaming in Yellow, Mike Sunday, Swiss Miss, and more in how to present things I found interesting. I have a long way to go before I attain their level of polish, but I hope to find the spirit sooner than later.
For a project like this, planning is everything
I would have been completely overwhelmed if I wanted to keep all of this information in my head. Each post has a deadline and a budget (thanks Merlin Mann for that advice). There’s a production status bar for what I have to do next on the post. Each “step” doesn’t take very long, but it’s really good to see it at a glance, and allows me to work asynchronously on multiple posts at once.
Notion’s Calendar feature is what creates a project like this possible.
Now, I know the obvious question is “how much time does this take to do?” Here’s my answer: it’s a hobby, and hobbies take up time. I’m enjoying the time it’s taking. But it’s also not really taking up any more time than was already being taken by consuming social media.
I pivoted to video pretty fast
If you can believe it, I didn’t actually think I’d do video. I was pretty happy to just make a blog post about each layout. I’m usually camera shy and often seize up if one is pointed at me. But here’s the thing: I’d already written the script. They were my words, they were positive, and I can back them up with imagery. I’d already done what I consider the hard part of making a video.
This is also part of modernizing my thinking about social media: it’s mainly video now. Making a carousel image post will get me 100 views, but a video version of the same content will get 300.
I began posting just to Tiktok, filming and editing the video in the app. I’ll be honest, I didn’t like it. For something simple, like making an image appear for 4 seconds instead of 3, was frustrating. So, I’m back to using Instagram Edits. I like that you can post to Instagram with music, and then export the video without music for other platforms.
What’s working and what isn’t
After a month of posting, I’m getting some attention on Instagram, Youtube, and Tiktok. I’m getting zero attention on Threads and Bluesky, despite having hundreds of followers. Some of that might have been the shock of a brand change. People might rightly see my posts and not recognize that it’s someone they decided to follow under my previous name. I don’t know how to square that one.
I’m also getting zero attention on Pinterest or Substack. Both might not survive this initial period of figuring out my strategy.
I’m tweaking the design as I go
I’ve already made two changes to the layout of LIL posts. Here was the first one:
This radius didn’t look right on Instagram, so I changed it to 32pt, and it currently looks a lot better. But this week, I also changed the vertical spacing to allow for more content to fit:
At first, I was making several different post sizes, for different social networks. This is time consuming and I’m not seeing a reward for the work, so I’m dropping it in favour of a single standard portrait size for posts. I can look into that again in the future when it makes sense to.
If you have any comments about the project, feel free to reach out.
For now, you can follow Layouts I Love here:
I’ll see you next month.
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