The Two Indicators of Success on Social

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: