Today’s edition is quick and to the point.
Actionable and easy to get started on right away.
Before we jump in, I’d like to give a shoutout to my friend Jacob Shipley.
Jacob is building a private community for social media professionals.
If you’d like to apply to join, click here.
^^This is not sponsored btw, I’m part of the community myself and just think it’s dope what he’s building.
Ok, let’s jump into this short, 803-word edition.
There are two main ways to determine success on social media:
Qualitative feedback and quantitative feedback.
In short, qualitative feedback is how people feel about your brand, what they are saying, and the overall sentiment when your name is brought up online.
Quantitative feedback is made up of the raw numbers. All of these should be clearly tracked and measured in your analytics dashboard.
Let’s talk about how to measure each of these more tactically.
How to measure qualitative feedback:
Look through your mentions, DMs, quote tweets, and replies.
Pay close attention to the words people are using when they engage with you.
Are there any consistent themes you’re seeing?
Are people thankful for you content?
Are people criticizing you for something?
Do people have unanswered questions?
What are people saying when they re-share your content?
Your goal is to make people feel positive about your brand.
If you’re not seeing the sentiment that you want once you do this exercise then this means you need to improve your content and do a better job at community management.
Stay on top of your mentions on a daily basis, be helpful in the replies, and make people feel seen so that they have more affinity towards your brand.
If people are re-sharing your content, take a second to thank them for the share. So simple to do and it goes a long way. They will be more likely to re-share more content in the future.
People often overlook this exercise and quantitative feedback overall because it’s tough to measure and not as clear cut as the quantitative feedback.
It’s also annoying to work on since it requires daily effort — and can be tough to face the truth if your brand isn’t where it should be in the eyes of your community.
Here’s an example that I recently ran into below. I make it a daily goal to like/respond to every neutral or positive mention that we get for our brand account (which can be really overwhelming at times but well worth it as you can see below).
How to measure your quantitative feedback:
Open up your analytics and look at the past 30 days.
Pick the main metric you are aiming to improve (total engagements, reach, shares, conversions/clicks, followers, referrals, etc.).
Is the number going up or down?
Compared to the past couple of months, how is the content performing?
Are there any outlier posts that are skewing the data? If there are outlier posts, why did those do great or poorly?
Take a second to ask yourself what is impacting the numbers.
Are there any trends in your top performing content? If so, make a note of that and test out that content format, theme, or social copy again in a future post.
Are there trends in your worst performing content? Did you get lazy this month and it is showing in the weak engagement?
Did one particular post drive a ton of followers? If so, test again in the future.
Did one of your posts have 2x the amount of bookmarks than likes? Why?
Did one of your posts have 5x the likes than most of your posts, but no replies? Why?
In general, you should always aim to increase engagement.
To be specific, I’d optimize for likes, replies, shares, and bookmarks.
If you can get all 4 in one post, that’s a home run.
Here’s a solid one I did a while ago. Not my most viral post but great mix of likes, replies, shares, and bookmarks — which tells me this content format and topic really resonated with people.
Even if you have a small following, sharing content that your community is most likely to engage with (while still remaining true to your brand) is important since it’ll provide you with more reach.
More reach results in new profile visits, which drives follower growth, which ends up giving you more reach in future posts.
And the cycle repeats.
If you’re finding value in this newsletter, I’d really appreciate a share on social!
It goes a long way for me.
Thank you!
Ish
What I loved this week: