The Three Month Hump

I'm sure you've heard of the three-month-hump theory in relationships, but I reckon the same theory can be applied to social media management and paid advertising. 

The three-month hump theory tells you that when you're in a relationship, that three-month point is where you stay or you go. I find the same thing to be true in social media land. Three months after taking over a client's account is often when I'll get a phone call or a message, and the client will say, “I'm not sure if this is worth continuing”. 

Now, what happens in those first three months of working with a client on something like social media or paid advertising is there's a lot of back and forth. There's a lot of getting to know the brand's voice, getting to know each other on a personal level, working out communication styles, and little nuances of particular industries. Three months is also the point where we've only really starting to see what the impact of the strategy is going to be. Now, I always try and tell my clients this three-month point is where so many people want to give up, but it’s also the point where it’s about to get really good.

This is the point where engagement starts going through the roof because you've been consistent and the algorithm is starting to pick it up and making things move. In those first couple of months, you can sometimes find that engagement actually drops a little bit because there's been a change in the way that you are showing up online. Unfortunately, this change means that there's going to be some people that drop off because they don't like that change. 

You've got to get past that three-month point for the algorithm to relearn how to deliver your content to the most relevant people. The same can be said with paid advertising. It can be really frustrating in those first couple of months that you're not seeing the return on investment coming through. The fact of the matter is it takes that long for the algorithms to be able to pick up all the signals that they need to pick up and learn and improve over time and then see the results from there. 

While you might not save fantastic results from your paid ads in those first three months, I can pretty much promise you, as long as everything's been working well in lead up, you're about to hit that point where the return on ad spend goes through the roof.