Beating Your Own Best Year
Most agency case studies are takeover stories. An account was dormant, or neglected, or being run by someone who didn’t have the time for it, and then we arrived. Those numbers are easy to produce, because the starting point was on the floor.
This isn’t one of those. We’ve run organic social for Kahr Firearms Group for four years, and the interesting comparison isn’t against whatever came before us. It’s against our own first year – a year we were happy with at the time. The median Facebook post today reaches 129% more people than it did then, earns 141% more engagement, and does it at the same engagement rate.
The harder thing isn’t fixing a broken account. It’s still finding room to improve one that’s already working.
The Brand
Kahr Firearms Group brings three American manufacturers under one umbrella. Kahr Arms, founded in 1995 around the original K9, builds compact and mid-size concealed carry handguns. Magnum Research, added in 2010, produces the Desert Eagle and the BFR revolver line. Auto-Ordnance, acquired in 1999, makes the Thompson along with the M1 Carbine and GI-model 1911s. We manage Auto-Ordnance’s social accounts separately, as its own program.
The group is headquartered and manufactures in Greeley, Pennsylvania, with Magnum Research in Pillager, Minnesota.
That portfolio is a good fit for a platform most brands have written off. Facebook’s audience didn’t leave – the competition for its attention did. For buyers who research a purchase for months and follow the brands they’re considering the whole time, that combination is an opportunity sitting in plain sight.
How We Measure This
Before the numbers, a note on which numbers.
Most social reporting leads with annual totals, and annual totals lie. One post that unexpectedly travels can carry an entire year and make a flat program look like a breakout. We’ve seen accounts post a record year while their typical post performed worse than the year before.
So we look at the median post. The one in the middle. It tells you what happens when your team publishes something on a normal Tuesday, and no single lucky hit can rescue it.
Everything below is median performance, organic only. No paid amplification was used on any post in this program across four years.
Year One to Year Four
The median Facebook post reaches 129% more people than it did in our first year, and earns 141% more engagement.
Not the best post. The middle one.
The engagement rate is the part worth pausing on. Median engagement rate per impression was 3.84% in year one and sits at 3.92% today. Reach per post grew 129% and the rate went slightly up. That distinction matters more than it looks: reach that grows while the rate collapses means you found a way to be shown to people who don’t care. Reach that grows while the rate holds means you found more of the right people.
And the trajectory didn’t flatten. Within this final year the median post climbed from under 3,000 impressions in January to over 40,000 by November. December was the strongest month in the account’s history, with a median post reaching six figures. The program’s best stretch is its most recent one.
What Changed Between Year One and Year Four
Video went from a format we used occasionally to the format the account runs on. In year one it was a small share of what we published. Today the median Facebook video post reaches more than 60,000 people – roughly five times what the median photo post does. Photos improved substantially over the same period on their own, which is the part that usually gets missed. The video strategy lifted the whole account, not just the videos.
The content got more specific. The posts that carry this account aren’t campaign pieces or brand films. They’re short, product-forward videos with a conversational hook: a close look at a particular pistol, a range session with the Desert Eagle, a custom BFR build shot well. Not “here is our brand” but “here is this exact thing, look at it.”
Four years of data compounds. By year four we knew which products moved, which formats held attention, when each brand’s audience showed up, and which ideas had already been used. That isn’t something a strategy deck produces on day one. It accumulates.
How We Work
Every social retainer we run gets the same structure.
A dedicated social media strategist owns the account. Not a rotating pool and not a shared queue – one person who knows the products, the audience, and what performed last month. When a client runs more than one service, those specialists sit on the same weekly call so the plans get built together rather than reconciled afterward.
Weekly calls, every week. A shared content calendar the client can see and approve against. A monthly performance report walked through live rather than emailed and ignored – which is how you catch a format losing steam in the month it happens rather than at the end of the year.
Monthly in-house photo and video production is part of the retainer, and it’s what makes everything above possible. A calendar built around what will perform, rather than around what happens to be in the asset library, requires producing the assets.
Why It Worked
We measured the middle, not the peak. Optimizing for annual totals produces a strategy built on hoping something goes viral. Optimizing for the median produces a program that works every week.
Video as the standing format, not the occasional swing. Producing it every month for four consecutive years is what moved the median rather than producing a highlight.
We went where the attention was cheap. Facebook’s audience is still there and fewer brands are competing for it seriously. For a portfolio built on collectors and enthusiasts, that’s the highest-leverage place to put the effort.
Time is the ingredient nobody sells. A three-month engagement can fix a broken account. Beating a good year takes four.
If your social program has been steady for a while, steady is worth interrogating. The ceiling is usually higher than the last few years suggest.
Services Involved
- Social Media Management – Dedicated strategist, content calendar, publishing, community monitoring, weekly calls, and monthly performance reporting across all active platforms.
- Video Production – Monthly in-house video production built for native social distribution.
Ready to Talk?
If your social numbers have been steady long enough to look normal, we should talk. Fill out the form below and tell us what you’re working on.