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Step Four: Measure Your Results

Lesson 8 from: Build a Social Media Plan That Actually Makes Money

Ryan Deiss

Step Four: Measure Your Results

Lesson 8 from: Build a Social Media Plan That Actually Makes Money

Ryan Deiss

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Lesson Info

8. Step Four: Measure Your Results

Lesson Info

Step Four: Measure Your Results

When you first start executing your social media plan, I just want you to do. I don't want you to overthink about it. Overthink about it, I don't want you to overthink it. Planning is guessing with ego and identity attached. You realize that? When you make a plan, you're guessing, but then saying, and yet, a big part of me is attached to this thing actually working, okay? So, when we talk about planning, I want you to think more, it's less about creating a plan that you're gonna chisel in stone, and this is way more about the scientific method. What do we do in the scientific method? We make a guess. It's a hopefully informed guess. We call it a hypothesis. But we generally make a guess, and we map out, I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna do this, and then this, and then this. And then I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna see what happens. I'm a huge fan of planning in reverse. We make some guesses, we create some steps, we sprint really, really fast, we stop, we pause, we look around, and we sa...

y, "What the heck happened?" If it worked, we keep doing it, we amplify it. If it didn't, we try something different. Planning is guessing with identity and ego attached. Don't chisel this stuff in stone, but do measure results. So, some of the metrics that really, really matter, and these vary a little bit across some of the different channels, so like I said, I'm gonna refer you to some of the other classes. If you're involved in Social Media Week, and you're attending all of them, you're gonna get that. If not, definitely make sure that you do invest in those classes as well. But some of the metrics that, for a broad basis that are really gonna matter is post engagement. Again, comments are much bigger than likes and shares. This has been the case for a while, and this has been confirmed by some of the reps and some of the folks that we we're able to talk to. And the platforms aren't shy about sharing. If you think about it, it makes sense, right? It's more meaningful if you're actually having a conversation. It's more, wait for it, social. It's more social. The big brands, the big media companies that have been, you know, that were leveraging Facebook for all their attraction, they didn't wanna actually talk to anybody. They wanted to post content, have people click, send them over to their website so that they could watch advertising. You wanna know why Facebook changed their algorithm to push out all these media companies is because they were direct competitors. Who didn't see that one coming? I mean, come on! They're direct competitors, they both want the same thing. They want eyeballs looking at ads that they can turn into revenue. Of course that was going to happen. So how do they know that you're not one of those people? You're actually talking. That's how they know that you're not a publisher. That's how they know that you're not merely monetizing through ad impressions. You're actually talking. Post engagement is big. I would much rather have a Facebook post with 50 comments than one with 50,000 likes and shares. Average reach per post. This is something you can go into Insights and look. How many people saw this particular post? Don't panic and freak out or get overly excited about any one particular post. You will have outliers. It could be seasonal. Maybe you posted on a particular day and there was a major world event, so nobody was paying attention. Sometimes the platforms will do tests in their algorithm, and you were on the wrong side of a test, so you just didn't get seen. So if you see an outlier, something's way, way off, either to the good or the bad, generally take it as an outlier and don't make a lot of, it was just a one-off post. What you do wanna watch for is your average. You wanna track your averages. You wanna track your averages. On average, what's the reach of this post, and if you start to see a slow and steady decline, then what that means is you're probably posting too much with not good enough content. The step for that is to back off, just a little bit, and really double down on quality. You need to get the quality up and the average engagement up and then Facebook will allow you to see. Cause all reaches, it's how many people Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Pinterest are allowing to see whatever it is that you're doing. The average is .5, some people, some brands are much, much higher because the algorithm has said that folks seem to really like this brand's content this person's content so we're gonna show it to more people. The way that you show that people really like your stuff is to really get that engagement going at the individual level. So less is more. Once you see the average start to go up now you can once again increase quantity. Okay, quantity. Profile page views, this is a biggy. The social profile is now kind of like the homepage of a website. And if you know anything about, I know we're not really talking about search marketing and search engine optimization but if you know anything about the different ranking factors a really big ranking factor with Google in particular is how many people just enter your url. How many people just go, they type in the url, your domain name and go straight to it. That direct look up, they're not searching for something and they find you but they're looking just for you, that's a signal. That's a signal to Google that you matter, that people know about you, that you're trusted cause they're seeking you out directly. It's a big, that's a big deal. Profile pages are that in social. If people are just going to Facebook.com/digitalmarketer Facebook.com/juggle.org, Facebook.com/ wherever it is. If they're going to your LinkedIn profile, if they're viewing that, if they're viewing your content and they're looking for you, that's a big signal. So think about ways that you can maybe encourage that activity. And then yes subscriber follower count. It's a metric worth tracking. It's not a metric worth bragging about. In general you want to see that it is going up. That's basically what we're looking at. You want to see that it's going up but just know organic growth is gonna be brutal in terms of likes and followers which is why we need step five, which we'll get into in just a second. A gift I wanna give you, something that's in the downloads area I believe, is we have the scorecards that we use at Digital Marketer, these are pretty rudimentary. We actually have these listed out on whiteboards so you can go and erase. But we'll track for a particular post going in there or averaging out for a week, what was our goal in terms of comments, profile views, likes, new followers, we'll go in and actually track this so that we can see it. If you don't make certain assumptions, if you don't have a hypothesis, if you can't decide at the beginning this is what winning looks like, then it's just an ego game. You gotta know is it working or is it not. So take a guess. What's good for you, if you're doing it right now probably something better then that. Maybe ask around. Find out what are some benchmarks in your industry. Or just guess. Guess, you can always go back and revise later on but you need to have a goal. So we've got them for Instagram and we have it for Facebook. So did two posts in a given week get over 500 engagements yes or no? Did two posts get over 10 comments? On the Instagram side, did five posts get over 150 likes? So you can see here generally what we're targeting and use that to kind of sus our your own order of magnitude.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Social Media Scorecards
Presentation Slides (PDF)

Ratings and Reviews

Cat in the Moon Photo
 

This class was phenomenal! Ryan was incredibly engaging and kept the subject matter easy to understand, even for someone who is quite new to all of this. I loved that even though the class is about social media, he brought everything back to the importance of human interaction. I highly recommend buying this class if you need a kick in the butt to get going on social media but don't know where to start.

Reichel Neil
 

Great class! Once again Creative LIVE has delivered excellent material which can be applied immediately.

Micayla Cathleen Short
 

This class was incredibly helpful. It helped break down the kind of content to post, how to get users to engage with our content, which platforms we should utilize, etc. Much appreciated! :)

Student Work

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