Most people either look at their numbers every day and learn nothing, or never look and learn nothing more slowly. A short review once a month beats both: long enough for a pattern to show, short enough that you will actually do it.
Before you start
Open the list of everything you published in the last month, with its reach and its replies. Not the summary on the dashboard — the posts themselves, one under another.
Thirty minutes, in four parts
- 1Five minutes. Sort by reach. Mark the top three and the bottom three.
- 2Ten minutes. Look at the top three. What do they share — the subject, the format, the first line, the hour? Write one sentence.
- 3Ten minutes. Look at the bottom three the same way. Were they different in kind, or just unlucky?
- 4Five minutes. Decide one thing to do more of and one thing to stop, for next month. Write both down.
What to ignore
- One post that went far above or below the rest. A single outlier is a story, not a pattern.
- The follower count on its own. It lags behind everything else.
- Anything that moved for a reason outside your control: a holiday, an outage.
Keep the notes
A line or two a month, in the same document, is a record that tells you more after half a year than any dashboard. You see what you decided, and what happened afterwards. Most of the value is in that comparison.
A review that ends in a decision is a review. One that ends in a table is a report. Aim for the first.