Turning one idea into a week of posts

Sit down on a Sunday with nothing to post and the feeling is always the same: the ideas have run out. It is worth testing that, because it is usually false. Ask the same person what they have been asked about most this month and they will answer in about four seconds. The ideas are there. What has run out is the ability to see more than one shape for them.

That distinction is the whole of this article. Most people treat an idea as a single post: you have the idea, you make the post, the idea is spent, and now you need a new one. At three posts a week that is a hundred and fifty original ideas a year, which is a demand nobody can meet and which nobody should be trying to.

The alternative is to treat an idea as raw material and the format as the thing you actually choose. Seven formats sit on a shelf, permanently. A good idea will genuinely support most of them, and the versions do not compete with each other, because they reach different people in different states of attention.

Running out of ideas is usually running out of formats

Watch what happens when somebody says they are stuck. They open the app, they look at what other people in their subject posted this week, and they try to find something nobody has covered. That search is hopeless by design: in any subject worth being in, everything has been covered, and being first is not what got anybody their audience.

The thing that makes a post yours is the treatment. Your specific mistake, your particular kitchen, the version you tried that did not work. All of that is available on an idea that has already been posted about ten thousand times, and it is available again on the same idea next month in a different shape.

There is also a plain arithmetic reason to stop hunting for new ideas. A new idea costs research, a shoot from nothing, and the risk that your audience does not care. A new shape on a proven idea costs an afternoon and starts from something you already know landed.

The seven shapes an idea can take

These are the seven that are always available, on any account, in any subject. They are worth knowing as a list, because the whole method is running an idea down the list and noticing which ones light up.

• A reel. The idea performed. Motion, sound, a hook in the first two seconds, and the widest reach of anything you can make.
• A carousel. The idea enumerated. Multiple beats in order, readable with the sound off, and the format people save because they intend to come back.
• A single image. The idea reduced to one frame, with the caption carrying most of the weight. The cheapest thing on the list to make.
• A story sequence. The idea happening live, in real time, to people who already follow you. Low stakes, high intimacy, and the only format where you can ask a question and get an answer in ten minutes.
• A written caption that stands alone. The idea argued in prose under a plain photograph. No performance, no edit, and the format that reliably gets the longest comments.
• A question to the audience. The idea handed over. You stop explaining and start collecting, and what you collect becomes the raw material for the next one.
• A follow-up. The idea revisited using what the earlier post produced. What people said, what you got wrong, what happened when you did the thing you recommended.

The last two are the ones people skip, and they are the ones that make the rest of it renewable. A question turns your audience into a source, and a follow-up gives you a post whose entire premise is that a previous post existed. Both are cheap to make and both are hard to run out of.

One of Maya's ideas, taken all the way through

Abstractions are easy to agree with and impossible to use, so here is one worked all the way to the hook. Maya runs a lifestyle account in Mumbai, 18,412 followers, and 143 of her feed posts have been analysed. Morning routine is her largest subject at 41% of them, and her strongest post is a reel called My 6am morning routine that reached 24,180 people and was saved 612 times.

The idea inside it is smaller than the post. It is this: what you do in the first ten minutes after waking decides the rest of the morning, and most people spend those ten minutes on their phone. That sentence is the raw material. Here it is in all seven shapes.

Look at the second column rather than the third. Nothing in it is a change of subject. What moves each time is the demand made on the viewer: watch this, read this, glance at this, be here now, think about this, answer this, come back for this. That is why seven versions of one idea do not feel repetitive to the person scrolling. They are being asked for seven different things.

The hooks move too, and they move in a specific direction. The reel hook is an accusation, because a reel has two seconds to stop somebody who was not looking for it. The caption hook is an admission, because whoever is reading that already follows Maya and does not need stopping. Same idea, different room.

The order you release them in changes what they do

Sequence is free and almost everybody wastes it. Run the same seven posts in a different order and they produce different amounts of material for you.

1. 01Lead with the widest format. The reel goes first, because it is the one that reaches people who do not follow you. Everything after it lands on a slightly larger audience, including some who arrived because of it. Publishing the reel last means every cheaper version was shown only to the people you already had.
2. 02Put the question early, not at the end. This is the reversal worth making. A question feels like a closing move and it works far better as a second or third post, because the answers become the content of the ones after it. Ask it late and you have collected a hundred useful replies for an idea you have finished with.
3. 03Let the cheap formats fill the gaps. The single image and the story sequence take under an hour each. They are what goes out on the days the shoot did not happen, and having them attached to an idea that is already working means a low-effort day still produces a post that belongs to something.
4. 04Hold the follow-up until it has something to follow. A follow-up posted before the responses arrive is just the same post again. Wait until the question or the reel has produced something you did not know, then make the correction the post. I was wrong about this is one of the few hooks that works without any performance at all.

proof: open your last three months, group the posts by what they were about, and count the groups. If thirty posts came from more than twenty subjects, formats are the thing you are short of

What does not survive being reused

Two categories break when you move them, and both are worth naming because both look like good material at the time.

The first is anything time-bound. A sale ending on Friday, a live session tonight, a launch, a reaction to something that happened this morning. The second version arrives after the moment has passed and reads as somebody talking about a train that has left. The salvage is to strip the date out and post the durable part later: the thing you learned running the sale rather than the sale.

The second is anything that only worked because of a trend. A sound at its peak, a format everybody was doing that fortnight, a joke that needed a reference people had in mind. Those posts perform because they arrived on a wave, and the wave is not there for version two. Six weeks later the same sound makes you look like somebody who has been away.

How to tell when an idea is finished

Ideas do get used up, and the signal is not boredom. You get bored of an idea long before your audience does, because you have been living inside it for two weeks and they saw it twice.

The signal is in the saves. Maya's widest reel of the year was about repeating one outfit: it reached 31,400 people and was saved 288 times. Her kitchen reel reached 11,905 and was saved 848. The first travelled further and almost nobody kept it, which is what an idea looks like when the format is doing the work and the substance is not landing. Repeat that idea in a fourth shape and it will reach people again and mean nothing again.

proof: take your widest post of the last six months and divide its saves by its reach, then do the same for your narrowest. If the widest one loses badly, the format travelled and the idea did not

So the practical test is a pair of numbers rather than a feeling. Reach holding steady while saves fall means the idea has stopped being useful to people, whatever the reach says. Both falling together usually means the format is tired rather than the idea, which is a different repair.

The other honest ending is when you have nothing new to be wrong about. An idea is alive while you can still say something you have not said: a mistake, a revision, a thing somebody in the comments corrected you on. When the only remaining version is the same sentence in a new font, the idea is done, and it will still be there in six months when you have lived a bit more of it.

One closing note about us, and it is the only one: our assistant will draft any of these seven shapes from the account's own posts, if starting from a draft suits you better than starting from an empty box.

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