The one change that took a local butcher to million-view months.

The Butcher Club is a retail butcher in Melbourne. When we removed their weekly specials posts, the account's consistently worst-performing content, and replaced them with an extra video each week, monthly views went from around 35,000 to over 500,000 consistently, with some individual months passing a million. Not bad for your local Aussie butcher.

The posts everyone was afraid to touch

Every week, the specials went up on the feed. Member prices, this week's deals, a tidy graphic. Why? Because that's how it had always been done, and when I took over the account we kept it going for exactly that reason. Traditions are comfortable.

But I review the numbers every month with every client, and the numbers kept saying the same rude thing: the specials were our lowest-performing posts, every single week. Nobody was coming to Instagram to read a price list. Meanwhile our video content was quietly doing better and better.

The call

So I made the call: remove the specials completely, replace that slot with one extra Reel a week. The owners were hesitant, understandably. Those specials felt like the whole point of the account, and dropping them felt like giving up shelf space. This is the moment most accounts never get past, because it means trusting the data over the habit.

The video content outperformed the specials tenfold. Off the back of that one change, the account went from roughly 35,000 views a month to over 500,000 a month consistently. The best months cleared a million. Butchers at the counter, 6:30am prep, ćevapi on the grill, the apprentice learning the block. Real people doing real work, which it turns out is exactly what people want to watch.

The lesson isn't about butchers

The lesson is that almost every business account is carrying dead weight it's never once measured. Content that gets posted out of habit, because that's what the account has always done. You'd be amazed how many businesses come to me having posted for years without ever looking at what performed and asking why.

• Open your insights once a month. That alone puts you ahead of most businesses.
• Find the thing you post out of habit. Check its numbers against everything else, and be honest about what you see.
• When the data says stop, stop, even if it feels wrong. Especially if it feels wrong.
• Give the freed-up slot to video. It isn't close, and here's why.

And if you're wondering whether your specials, your quote tiles or your awareness-day posts are your version of the price list, they probably are. The Work page has the Butcher Club videos if you want to see what replaced them.