📙 #034 - Social Media Engagement Safari
📙 #034 - Social Media Engagement Safari
We're going on a social media engagement call to action hunt, We're going to catch a big one, I'm not scared. Can't go over it, Can't go under it, Can't go around it, Got to go through it!
Well hello!
Something different this week, which means that, yes, I'm not as far along with the tutorial scripts as I'd hoped.
Instead, a mini-presentation/talk about social media engagement (the 10-10-10 rule) I've given over the years has been cropping up in conversation a bit more recently, so I thought I'd get it down into words (and a bit of maths, sorry). But first two links for you.
# LINKS
Owen published this short blog post a couple of weeks ago: "Year of the Artist." It's a quick read, and I enjoyed it because it's a peek into someone's thought process about goal setting, being an artist, and making public statements about that (which work well as a form of accountability).
Suppose you're thinking about setting a "North Star" to guide yourself and creating an Artist Statement (I highly recommend it, although I found the whole process torturous). In that case, Owen has an excellent example on his bio page: https://www.owmo.studio/bio.
Meanwhile, there's an interview with drawing machine artist Pablo over here: "Quitting Engineering to Pursue Art Full-Time." This is a great profile, but it also covers something close to my heart: actually selling work. The whole interview is excellent and comes from a slightly different direction (art at business) to what we usually see (how to make pens draw).
## Follow ups
Both of these reminded me of a couple of things that I've found helpful.
The first is using the phrase "Act it until you are it" instead of "Fake it till you make it." It's a subtle shift, but the usual phrase suggests you're "faking" at the start, and you shouldn't feel like you're faking anything you're trying to learn. " Acting it until you are it" starts with a positive action. Faking is pretending; acting is being.
The second is the book "Uncommon Accountability" by Brian P. Moran & Michael Lennington for those who want to be use accountability to help them get stuff done, but not by, you know, involving other people, ugh! Short very there’s stuff in there about practicing accountability with yourself in a carrot, not stick way.
# THE 10-10-10 SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT RULE
Or, why don't people click on my stuff? At the end, there's a fun little social media engagement safari game you can play.
Way back in a whole other lifetime, I helped build the photo-sharing website Flickr. Since then, I've done work for Google, Yahoo!, The Guardian, Channel 4 etc. etc., various museums, cultural organisations, and so on. Parts of that involved keeping a finger on the pulse of social media engagement.
A long time ago, there was the 10-10-10 rule, and simply, it went like this...
For each piece of "content" you publish, 10% of your followers will lightly engage with it, i.e. like/heart it. 10% of those will moderately engage in the form of a comment or quoted repost (a normal repost sits somewhere between the two). Of those, 10% will follow a call to action.
So, if you had 10,000 followers and created a post with the call to action "Go view my newsletter" and a link out, 1,000 would like it, 100 would comment/repost, and 10 would follow the call to action.
If you had 1,000 followers, then 100 likes, 10 comments, 1 call to action.
Obviously, this is a sweeping generalisation, but it was "truthy" enough to be a helpful barometer and generally worked across a bunch of platforms I got to hang out with in San Francisco.
Now, though, in the world of the "algorithmic feed" rather than "chronological feed", it should be the 10-10-10-10 rule...
10% will see the post/content of those...
10% will lightly engage (like/heart) of those...
10% will comment/repost of those...
10% will follow the call to action
(Where the first 10% is really 5%)
Making our new breakdown if we had 10,000 followers as...
1,000 see it
100 like it
10 comments (less on Instagram, natch)
1 follows the call to action
So if you have 1,000 followers, then 100 see it, 10 like it, 1 comment and errrr... 0.1 person follows the call to action!
So, take the number of followers you have; on Twitter, I have 7,939 followers, so ultimately 0.79 people will follow a call to action. On Instagram, I have 13,400, so 1.34 people will.
Totally a numbers game, which is why I put Kitty in charge of posting to twitter.
Those numbers skew at very large and small values. When you have fewer followers, they are more engaged so that you may get more moderate and call-to-action responses. In the millions of followers, things can skew upwards in the lightly engaged actions.
1,000,000 million followers? 100,000 views, 10,000 likes, 1,000 comments, 100 call to actions.
You're more likely to get more views but fewer likes, comments, and calls to action.
We'll ignore viral edge cases.
One takeaway from this is that if you have less than 1,000 followers and you want someone, anyone to follow a call to action, you can't just post something once and then go, "Well, I don't want to bother people too much, I guess that's my only post about thing [x]" ... you essentially have to post it ten times to get a similar response to someone with 10,000 followers, and, in theory a hundred times to match someone with 100,000 followers (who still only get 10 call-to-action responses per post).
### The Safari
The fun part about all this is that sometimes the data leaks out, and you can spot it in the wild. It's not often, but you, too, can go on a social media engagement safari!
There's a musician I follow on Twitter who (at the time) had just shy of 100,000 followers; occasionally, they'd tweet out a call-to-action that could be roughly measured. A couple of times, it was to some go-fund-me or sign-this-petition thing. The trick was, if you spotted it soon enough and could see the number-of-people-who-donated/signed go up, was to watch it over 24-48 hours to get an idea of how many people liked & reposted the tweet, and how many did-the-thing.
The results pretty much matched the 10-10-10-10 rule. In 24 hours, from the 97,000 or so followers, 7 appeared to support the thing (we assume 9,700 saw it, 970 liked it, 97 commented/reposted, 9 in theory followed the call to action, 7 we could see). In this case, the thing (charity) didn't totally align with the main reason people were following the artist (music), so there's that to take into account.
Go find yourself a reasonably successful musician to follow!
Sometimes, less often, when you sign up or order things, you can get a clue from the order number; if your order is #10047, there's a good chance you're number 47 😁
But if you keep your eye out, now and then, there's a moment you spot where you realise you can track the numbers. It's kind of fun (or depressing).
### The Funnel
Sometimes, you can catch the numbers in the funnel!
The "Funnel" is its own kind of 10-10-10-10 and blown out of all proportion by drop-shipping-bros selling online courses.
The short version goes something like this: You give a thing away for free, and 10% of people go grab that thing. 10% of those people sign up for a newsletter/mailing list/waitlist, 10% of those buy the introduction course/ebook whatever or get access to a free forum/Discord chat, and 10% of those sign up for the 1-to-1 "learn how to sell things on the internet" coaching/mentorship.
Where "learn how to sell things on the internet" is, of course, "set up a 'funnel' with a free thing, a newsletter/Discord, a course/ebook (which they can sell you), and then coaching (they can sell you the white-label PDFs for those, too)".
Snark aside, for people who enjoy dissecting and understanding these things, it's fun to sign up for all the free stuff and watch how the funnel works. And, sometimes the thing can actually be useful.
And often it's possible to figure out numbers.
Anywhere that has a forum, Discord, or members area often has a member directory and, sometimes even better, a new/latest member area. This is where you can figure out how many people are there and the rate at which they're joining.
Two case studies, for things I was interested in, so I did put money on the line for these (going one level 'deeper').
One, a YouTuber who has over 1 million followers, has a course with forum access for around $50. There are just under 1,000 members, and the rate they've joined has slowed right down; I know cause I'm counting 😁
So, with our 1,000,000 (subscribers) 👉 100,000 (viewed) 👉 10,000 (likes) 👉 1,000 (comment) 👉 100 (call to action) and them promoting it around 10 times before it launched, it seems about right.
Two: an arts coach with 15k Twitter, 5k Facebook, 5k LinkedIn, and 10k Instagram = 35k. Assuming some overlap, we can guess around 23k unique followers.
They launched a new course about four months ago, for around £80.
The forum/teaching platform you have to sign into currently has around 180 members. That number was a bit hidden away (it’s not on the website at all), but the iPhone app gave it away when you clicked through a couple of things.
Fancy maths says 23k followers = 2.3 people following each call to action = 78 calls to action spread over the four networks over the last (4*30) 120 days.
So we can say they either made a call-to-action post once every day and a half, alternating around each network (which is true). Or a different way of doing the maths is three people signed up every two days (which is mathematically averagely true 🧮).
FWIW: £80 * 180 = £14,400 = £3,600 per month, before all costs (the course involves a lot of video production). But I'm assuming the main purpose of the £80 course/access is to funnel people to the 1-2-1 coaching.
### ANYWAY...
The short answer is; yes, hardly anyone is following your call to action. Yes, you have to shout it many times over. No, it hasn't really gotten worse, it's always been shit. But yes, it did get a lot worse (about ten times) when the algorithm stopped showing your content to everyone.
Bonus: No, the original move from chronological to algorithmic feeds wasn't cunning or malicious. It was simply because the backend systems for most of the main sites couldn't scale to handle chronological feeds as user numbers grew, and algorithmic feeds were a technical solution to that problem. This just so happens to have good/bad consequences depending on which side of the advertising budget you're sitting on.
### NEWSLETTERS
Are the exception to the 10-10-10-10 rule; they generally follow a 50-10-20-100 rule 🧐
This newsletter has 712 subscribers: 356 will open the email, 10%/35.6 will then lightly engage, of which 20% (7.12) will comment/repost, 100% of them (although often a different 100%) will follow the call to action/click on a link, around 7, thank you!
### THE SMART MOVE FOR ME HERE...
...would have been to have a call to action all ready to go.
# AI
I realised the last few sections were very wordy, so above is a picture of how Kitty summarised chapter three of "Designerly Ways of Thinking" by Nigel Cross, plotted on the Cricut Maker with a pen adapter.
"This perspective challenges the notion of AI as a competitor to human intelligence in design and instead positions it as a complementary tool that can augment and expand the human creative process. By taking on the more laborious or complex aspects of design, AI can free human designers to focus on the more creative, intuitive, and strategic aspects of their work. This cooperative relationship between human and artificial intelligence in design could lead to more innovative, efficient, and effective design processes and outcomes, ultimately enhancing the field of design."
But then she would say that wouldn't she?
# THE END
The style guide tool I use to check for typos and gramma, hates, how I’ve written ‘10’ and ‘1’ throughout this newsletter, instead of ‘ten’ and ‘one’ but it’ll just have to suck it up, because all the maths looked super weird when I did that.
That’s quite enough for one newsletter, and it’s far too early for…
…which is currently sat next to me.
Time for lunch, and thank you for hanging out for my 10-10-10-10-ted-talk.
I love you all
Dan
❤️
You'll receive my next newsletter around May 16th.
My man, where that call to action at? ✨