Is my social media strategy working?

I saw the below post today by Tommy Clark , and it posed a valid, very top-of-mind question: “How do I know if our social media strategy is working?”

One, do I even have an official social media strategy?

Two, wouldn’t I know if it was working?

Because I’ve been posting content more than I have ever posted before this year and the only feelings I can remember right now as I write this post is cringe and desperation and ineptitude. Maybe social content isn’t for me?

I appreciate that Tommy Clark broke it down for me so I didn’t wallow in my negativity.

There are only 2 parameters that matter: social metrics and business metrics.

But what do those indicators even mean? I had to watch the video to find out.

tl;dw:

Social Metrics: follower growth, impressions, engagement rate, in platform metrics etc.

• These are not vanity metrics (or hopefully, they shouldn’t be). These parameters determine the pipeline you’re generating.
• This metric is a leading indicator — it’s how you fill the room/grow the audience/etc.
• For social metrics, we should be seeing some sort of follower growth or impressions trending upwards.

Business Metrics:

• These metrics determine whether your social metrics are vanity metrics or not.
• This metric is a lagging indicator —it shows if the social content is leading to a business outcome you care about? The business outcome is very specific to your company — for example, sales closed.
• Business metrics take a long time to kick in — the social metrics are an investment. But the social metrics compound and can lead to meaningful changes.

The metrics make sense to me. Also, the pre-requisite here is that you need to be collecting and analyzing the data.

Luckily, most social media platforms automatically collect the data for social metrics.

And as an enterprising founder, I collect the business metrics (I use LookerStudio!).

So let’s do a retrospective, for me and for Smarty.

I’m writing this post in real-time so I have no idea what we’re going to learn about whether my poorly thought out social media strategy is working.

Because going back to my original question: do I even have a social media strategy?

This year, I tried to learn from Adrian Alfieri (thank you for letting me!), who conveniently posted this post today :

You should focus on 2 types of content verticals:

1. Social proof content
2. Product/category education

I not doing the first at all. I’m partially doing the second.

You might think this is disheartening information for me, but it’s the opposite actually.

I have room to grow! That is optimism at work!

I need to be generating more of #1 and #2 in a focused, consistent way. That’s something tangible that I can do.

But then that leads to the question — what have I been doing in 2023?

Again, I’m writing this post in real-time and doing a retrospective.

I’ve compiled almost all the content I wrote this here: blog.smarty.ai

It’s generic, filled with posts on known productivity playbooks, mental models, and my founder’s journey.

In my mind, it counts for category education. Smarty is a productivity tool that uses AI features to help you power through your work day.

But even just writing that out, I’m missing social media content about how Smarty works, about future of work, and about how AI features empower you!

Again, you might think this analysis is disheartening but it’s not. It’s room to improve with tangible next steps.

The hardest part of being a founder is the unknown unknowns.

As soon as you have a roadmap and actionable next steps, it honestly feels like the fog has cleared :) Hope.

But I’m not done yet — did my haphazard strategy work this year at all? Let’s look at the data and do a real retrospective.

According to ChatGPT: how do you conduct a retrospective?

I didn’t use the right framework to prompt ChatGPT (checkout Allie K. Miller 's WISER framework , which has consistently worked for me!) but it still gave me a plan.

Specifically, #3 and onwards.

#3. Analyze Performance

To make it easy, I looked at the past year:

I started posting on January 27th (with Adrian’s help). I also had a summer slump.

Surprisingly, my biggest post was a repost of Eric Partaker 's wonderful curation of 6 productivity YouTube channels on . <- It’s my 2023 holiday watch list so check it out :D

This piece of content falls under “Category Education”, which is part content vertical number two. What date did I post it? I don’t know — I cannot figure out what 1 month ago means.

Either way, this content is not Smarty product education and I don’t think it drove any business metrics. Let’s confirm by looking at that date in LookerStudio.

One month ago in LookerStudio would have been November 12th? I think the post is older than that, but LinkedIn won’t tell me the exact date :/ Why?

So let’s get sleuthing instead. I use Buffer to post sometimes. This post of Eric’s was posted between a Buffer post that went out on October 19th and a Buffer post that went out on October 20th. So I reposted it on ~October 20th. LinkedIn was not as helpful as I was hoping. But still, what does that mean on LookerStudio:

I had 5 new users onto our website from LinkedIn on those two days:

That’s not bad. My next biggest posts:

3/4 have to do with the origins behind Smarty — product education! Clearly, I need to spend more time here.

My biggest follower spike also was related to that repost of Eric — wow!

Honestly, data is a rabbit hole and it's confused me even more. I learned something though — I need to write more case studies and focus more on Smarty as a product. And it doesn’t hurt to re-post valuable content because it’s a great way to grow my following. That might be a vanity metric but it might also one day lead to great product and business metrics :D

Wrapping this real-time retrospective up, I've learned a ton from digging into our LinkedIn data.

Next steps for me are putting together a content calendar to keep our posts aligned with the two verticals identified and adding some more spotlights on the data. I'll also be playing around with different ideas to see what sticks.

Excited to see where this retrospective takes us in 2024 – here's to growing our community and making an even bigger splash online!

Thanks for walking through it all with me! ??