"The Bucket Method"
A handy hack when it comes to measuring what matters is to "bucket" your data into categories.
For example, imagine a giant jar of "conversation hearts". Now imagine being asked to count all of the "kiss me," "hug me," "real love" and "my baby" messages without touching the jar or the candies inside. All you can do is eyeball them.
You might count a view that is visible and use your gut to guess, but that wouldn't be accurate at all.
But what if you could remove the conversation hearts and separate each message into its own group, or bucket.
Better Measurement
You could easily count each message once it's been separated out and grouped.
Now let's say you need to determine which message is printed on the most hearts and which is printed on the least.
No problem. You can quickly and easily answer such a question by eyeballing the piles. Or for even better accuracy, simply count and declare.
Measuring is Just a Matter of Counting
Measuring the success of key social media marketing messages is similar to counting conversation hearts.
Yet so many small business owners try and eyeball their content to get insights. The eager beavers go to their social media insights and look at the reports. They see top posts for the month or week and think they should do more of the same. But that's like looking at the top of the conversation hearts jar and assuming that whatever is on top represents the most popular message. It may or may not be.
Eyeballing is inaccurate at best and downright wrong at worst.
Instead of eyeballing, group your content into larger "buckets" to get better insights.
How it works with Social Media
Say you want to know which kinds of images perform the best: florals, tablescapes, reception details, or couple portraits.
By assigning each post to one of those categories and measuring for a period of time, you can get a better sense of what image type works to drive engagement and even traffic.
Once you understand the image types that drive engagement and traffic, you can start doing more tests from there.
For example, if you find that florals work well in your feed, you may want to run another test to see if seasonal, off-season or exotic florals work well. Or you may want to test different arrangement styles, different flower types or different color palettes.
By bucketing and measuring one thing at a time, you can have your content optimized in a matter of months, rather than continuing to spin your wheels and guess what's working.
The best part is you'll be able to test which content actually drives website traffic and inquiries.
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