Welcome to episode 344 of Hit the Mic with the Stacey Harris.
All right, beginning of a new quarter means it’s time to check in on your social media numbers, if you haven’t yet. And yes, I don’t just mean your social media numbers. I want you to check in on how your content’s doing, how your website is doing, how things are converting, where your revenue goals are. I like to check in on all the things a lot because there is a wealth of information and answers to a lot of our pressing questions that we’re spending thousands of dollars asking coaches and consultants and paying people to execute on things. A lot of times the answers to the question are in the data and other times it’s good to check in to see if the things they’re telling us or doing for us are, you know, well, working. So that’s what we’re gonna start with.
I want to talk about some of the social media numbers you need to be paying attention to and why they matter. Daily, I like to check in on my vanity metrics, my follower counts, a real big picture. Has anyone been engaging in the last couple of days or really in the last 24 hours? Full disclosure, I don’t do this every day. I don’t do it on weekends, just my work days. This is one of the things I do to literally start my day because it will impact where or how or what I am going to be doing during my social networking time. By social networking, I mean actual engagement on social media. It will really be impacted by how those numbers are doing versus my goals.
So whenever I’m checking in on these things I’m looking at where my goal is and where my results are coming from so I can see if they’re lined up. I actually keep these in an excel doc in my Google drive and it gets opened every single morning. We look and see what’s working and what’s not working. Again, basically our vanity metrics are the email lists, the Facebook followers, the Twitter followers, the Instagram followers, and a real brief look at engagement, what’s happening engagement wise. The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.
But what’s cool is when I check in on these things quarterly, and I do my big review of the 12 weeks, if I hit my goals, if I missed my goals, and I evaluate what needs to be changed going into the next 12 weeks, it’s nice to have that comparison of the daily numbers because I can see where my numbers were at the end of March versus the beginning of January or even the end of March to the beginning of March. I can see where there was growth, where there was some stagnant activity or, in all honesty, where maybe there was a decrease. Maybe I did a big promo push to …
Great example of this, in March we did an affiliate promo for Denise Duffield Thomas, who I’m a big big fan of and she’s one of the two people who I promote their content and their courses as an affiliate, and that obviously caused some unsubscribes on my email list, which is absolutely fine. I’m a big proponent of not being upset about unsubscribes. But, I could see very clearly in my numbers where there was stalled out growth. Although there were still people subscribing and growth to my email list, you can’t actually see that growth because there were also unsubscribes happening and a little bit of a peak rate versus where they usually are.
Knowing what’s going on and being able to see a whole stretch of numbers is really helpful. That’s why I make sure I track those daily. On the flip side of that, weekly I’ll go in and I’ll actually look at my email list because I send an email once per week. I’ll look at subscribes, unsubscribes, clicks, where they’re clicking, what they’re clicking on. I do this because, guess what guys, it will impact any testing or changes or evolving that I want to do to the email the next week. So, once a week I actually check in on those numbers.
Again, I’m not somebody who gets upset about unsubscribes. I’m not somebody who lives and dies by the number on their email list, how many people I have. Everybody loves having a large list. Everybody loves seeing that number go up because it means their community size is going up. Obviously that’s really important and that’s really valuable, but the numbers I watch most are my opens, my clicks, and my conversions, meaning is the money actually in the list. Because sometimes, it can be really easy to think “Hey, the money’s in the list. If I just keep growing it, I’ll be making bank.” Right? No. You want to make sure the money is in the list because there are people who are actually interested in what you’re talking about on the list.
This is something that I had to really come to terms with early in my business, because I was so about list growth and so about having this massive list. But literally no one on my list was buying. Whereas now, I’m fairly confident when I send out an email that there’s going to be a certain percentage of purchases because it’s a targeted environment. I’m not only sending out to people who are active and interested, but I am also sending out content that is directed at them based on their segment, meaning they are somebody who needs help with Facebook. So when I send them a Facebook thing, it’s a no brainer that it’s a yes for them or at least a click and a conversion through some follow-up emails or whatever.
So it’s really really important that you have a quality list and it’s well segmented and that it’s gonna take action. Names for the sake of names, email addresses for the sake of email addresses, not fun. You guys know, as members of this community, I’m really transparent about what’s going on. This is actually one of the things I’m really tightening up in quarter two. We’re really evolving how our email sequence systems and segmentation and, in all honesty, list clean-up happens in this year.
I’m actually going to be implementing some new funnels that will drop people off the email list if they don’t engage after a certain amount of time. If they’re not clicking, if they’re not replying, if they’re not engaging with the content, there’s no reason for me to continue to email them. There’s no reason for me to continue to pay to have them on my list. When your list starts to get to a certain size, you have to pay a larger amount. There’s no reason for me to be filling that space with information that they’re not going to engage with.
Again, this is a big big big big big project that we have going on behind the scenes for Q2, which is implementing a whole lot of new funnel structures into my own email marketing. So you might see some cool, crazy, weird emails. Okay, they won’t be weird, but you’ll see some segmentation happening either because you’re going to get slightly different copy or whatever the case may be. Cool? I’m excited about it.
But that’s what I want you to be checking on weekly is your email content. If you’re somebody who sends out a piece of email once a week, you need to be checking in on that stuff. One caveat to that before I go to the other piece of weekly things, if you are in a launch period or you are doing some sort of promo and you’re sending out extra emails, which is fine, do that. It’s important that you sell to your email list, because, again, that’s the only way there’s actually money in this mythical list. You might want to check on these things a little more often. When I’m in launch mode, I check email daily because it’s entirely possible that there’s an email going out to some section of my audience every day over the course of the launch period, depending on how big the launch period is, obviously. So it’s something I do check more often when we’re in active launch mode.
The other thing I check weekly is we check podcast numbers, what shows are doing really well, what episodes are still getting some steam. That actually helps fill the content calendar because we obviously are going to do more of what you listen to. It’ll also help with Facebook Lives because I’ll repurpose content from the podcast for Facebook Lives when we run into popular episodes. Also we will make sure our download numbers are on track. If I tried something different with an episode or I had a guest or whatever, I want to know if that’s working or it’s not working really really quickly so that I don’t do it again or that I do it all the time now, depending on the reaction. So we do check on content.
The same can be said for your blog posts. We did the same thing for our Linked in publisher posts. We look at the engagement. We look at the clicks through back to the website, all of that, once a week so that we can make sure that this stuff is working. Right? All right.
Then once a month I go through my daily and my weekly stuff and look at the big picture. What does this mean? I’m accumulating this daily data, this weekly data. What does that mean big picture? We go into Google analytics and we sort of dig in to what’s happening. Maybe where we’re losing people or where people are converting more often than other places and what does that mean for the following month.
The reason I do this stuff so often is I want to be able to make tweaks and changes very quickly so that I can see growth. This is actually something I learned from reading the 12 Week Year. I don’t actually execute the 12 week year. I have friends that do but I don’t have that structure. I look at 12 months and then I break it down into quarters. So I have 12 week goals, but I don’t treat them as separate years, if that makes sense. They all sort of rely on each other for the big picture of the 12 months. But really looking at the things that are happening day in and day out so that I can make decisions really quickly.
Sometimes when you do 12 month planning like I do, it’s easy to get into the habit that you only need to check in on these things once a year and it can really slow down your growth, and your progress, and your development, and the evolution of your business because you’re just simply not checking in often enough. So I do, I check in really really often so I can make these adjustments really quickly. Oftentimes they’re adjustments you won’t necessarily notice because I try to test only one thing at a time, try being the optimal word there, but it’s really important that I look at these things on the regular.
Now, as far as the next steps, head over to the backstage community. In the most recent area, I think it’s third or fourth down, there is a social media focused daily, weekly, monthly numbers. Exactly what to measure inside of there just for your social media. Then of course in the private community you can ask specifics about your stuff and content emails, those kind of stats, how to make those work for you. Should you have additional questions about those pieces, that really is the place to go to ask those questions.
If for some reason you have not yet joined us inside of Hit the Mic Backstage, well now is the time to do it, hitthemicbackstage.com, but I know most of you are, in fact, members because you get that it’s, again, the show upgraded. There’s video trainings and the opportunity to ask me questions. You can post questions in the private community anytime, but of course I’ll be there live from 10 to 12 Pacific Time every Wednesday, which means you’ll get an immediate answer during those hours.
That’s it for today. I will see you guys backstage and of course I’ll see you next Tuesday. So have a great week, bye.
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