Help! My results suck on social

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Good morning afternoon!

Welcome to Social Studies.

Here’s the agenda for this week:

• brought to you by beehiiv

• what to do when metrics suck

• creators I like

• want to work together?

• poll: what should I write about next week

• can I tell you my favorite dad joke?

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MY RESULTS SUCK

What do you do when your results start to dip?

First… Let me clarify….

If you’ve always struggled to get traction on social, this doesn’t apply. In that case, I’d test, test, and test, until you get signals about what your audience resonates with.

Today, I want to tackle what to do if you used to get great results, but now you’re struggling.

Randomness vs Uniformity

Which one of these looks random to you?

The one on the right looks random, but it’s not. It’s uniform.

It’s what we expect random to look like.

But when it rains… what does the ground look like? Obviously not a perfect grid.

If you flip a coin ten times, you would think it would come out:

H, T, H, T, H, T, H, T, H, T

But in reality, it probably looks like:

T, T, H, T, H, H, H, T, H, T

Humans are really really good at seeing patterns in randomness and seeing randomness in patterns.

Because I’m a writer and not a mathmetician, let me refer you to this one minute clip from Numbers to illustrate the point.

So what?

So…

If you were getting great results and now it seems like EVERYTHING you post bombs…

Maybe the algorithm has changed.

Maybe all your content lately has sucked.

Maybe the platform shadowbanned you.

Or… Maybe you’re seeing patterns that are actually random.

Of course, over the long run, good content will succeed. It’s in the platform’s best interest to get good content in front of a lot of people.

So if your metrics stink for month after month, I’d revisit your content and your strategy.

That being said, there are so many different variables that impact a post’s success. (Time of day, day of week, initial audience, I could go on for days.)

As a result, there is a bit of randomness to whether or not your content will succeed.

Anyone who tells you that there is zero luck involved is a liar.

Anyone who tells you that it’s all luck is also a liar.

All that to say…

Don’t stress yourself out.

You’re still good at your job.

Give it time and you’ll have a streak of bangers and you’ll be convinced that you’re God’s gift to social media strategy.

Give it some more time and it’ll flatten back out.

It’s all part of the game.

-Jacob

CREATORS I LIKE

WORK TOGETHER?

• I like helping cool brands and creators scale using social (and leveraging my audience when it’s a good fit). Reply to this email to start the conversation.

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