How to use research, ideation, rapid testing, and analysis to iterate on your social media content.

I’ve recently begun using social media to create content in association with my podcast (check it out 😉). I’ve begun using analytics and really trying to pay attention to what content gets more engagement. It’s been a fun journey. Putting effort and positive energy into creating content and making connections using social media makes it a much more fulfilling tool.

Through this more intensive use of social media, I realized that I’ve simply started using the design process to improve my social media content. This idea simplified things for me. I realized instead of making everything up as I go along, I can draw upon the frameworks for iteration that the design process provides. In this article, I want to share what using the design process for social media looks like, and how it can increase the effectiveness of your content.

Before I dive in, here’s a quick refresher on the design process:

The number of different diagrams on the design process is actually quite obscene. Source: https://zurb.com/word/design-process

Basically, you come up with ideas, test those ideas, iterate with prototypes based on feedback until you’ve enough positive feedback that you’re ready to invest a larger amount of resources to build the final version of whatever you’re designing. Then you analyze the performance and start from square 1!

Step 1 — Define Your Goals

In the context of social media, here’s what questions you need to answer to figure out the goals around content creation.

Why do I want to create content on social media?

This is the most important part of the whole process — the seed that will motivate and direct you when things get difficult. My answer to this question was this:

I want to create content on social media so I can enhance the reach of the message I’m trying to spread with my podcast. I want to create content that is a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the social media noise. Creating social media content will help me promote my podcast while giving me a greater opportunity to grow my platform to spread positivity, empowerment, and awareness.

Your answer is going to be full of its own character, but hopefully this helps get started. More questions to answer when defining your purpose:

What audiences should I reach out to in order to fulfill my why?

My answer:

Since I want to breed as much positivity as possible, I’ll aim for an audience that is most likely to be most receptive to this message while the most likely to look at the content. So, I’ll reach out to young college students and professionals! They are young enough to be changed significantly by content I release and old enough to have the maturity that’s required for desiring self-improvement and expansion of awareness.

This is also where you’ll want to lock in the platforms you’re targeting. Don’t try to do more than 3 at first. Trust me. Unless you’re superhuman or have a lot of time for this stuff (or are getting paid 💸).

How much do I want to get out of this content? What are the quantifiable end goals?

My answer:

My end goal for creating this content is to get $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue from my podcast and related content within 6 months time.

I know, it’s disappointing for it to come back to money. After all that talk of positivity, you would’ve thought that I was a decent person with no ulterior motives…

All jokes aside, I want to monetize the empowerment and knowledge I spread so I can create a financial foundation on which to create products, experiences, and organizations to empower and uplift people on a greater scale. So I guess that is my end goal. But… I need to focus.

Anyways, Answer these questions in a google doc, and you’ll have your foundation for your social media design process!

Deliverables: A guiding document with mission statement, audience personas, and eventual goal.

Step 2 and 3 — Ideate and Prototype

The good thing about social media as a platform is it makes it easy to execute on these steps.

My ideation process is simple. There’s no complicated timer/sticky note/critique dance that happens at most agencies, because I’m doing it all by myself. I just drink coffee, and let ideas flow. For organizing my content scheduling, I’m using Airtable. As far as organizing content goes, Airtable takes the cake. Using it feels as if Excel, Google Drive, and a task manager app had a super-child.

Live look in to every Airtable user at the moment

Note: These are referral links for Airtable, but I don’t really care about the credit I might get. I just want to put you on to an amazing tool that I love using 😃

So when ideating, I throw down my ideas onto a spreadsheet in the “Post name” field. After taking an hour or so to shotgun ideas out there, I delete the ones that don’t fit into my strategy or are 💩.

Once I have the ideas I want to move forward with, I drill down into them. Usually this looks like creating three copies (one for each platform), and filling in the copy details, creating the videos, etc. Using a spreadsheet (the base format for viewing your data in Airtable) works really well for this because you can jot down the ideas quickly and just add fields from there.

To summarize: The process to rapidly generate and refine ideas looks like this:

Think of many ideas with unfettered creative freedom -> Clean out the 💩 Ideas -> Refine what you have left to posting quality.

I usually do this sprint to produce a weeks worth of content at a time. Start with enough for 2 weeks of posting daily to build a foundation of followers, then start doing tighter iteration cycles of a week.

The great thing about social media is that you simply use content as your ‘prototype’. With this, you can get wonderful analytics on its performance, which I’ll get into in a second.

Deliverables: Your social media content! Start with 2 weeks worth of content per sprint, then do weekly iterations once you have a solid following.

Step 4 — Analyze performance.

So, you just finished your first two weeks of posting regular content for your followers. Congratulations! Being good at social media takes more work than it seems. Now it’s time to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and how you can improve.

To spare many unnecessary words, I’m just going to share some screenshots of how I analyze my social media performance. It’s only a few weeks old, so if you see places where I can make it better or stuff I’m missing, please comment with your suggestions!

To start, I have a table set up for each platform that shows the performance of key metrics for each type of post on that platform during a date range.

My stats are not so great yet…

The metrics I like to focus on are views per post and engagement %. You want to make sure you’re reaching as many people as possible. Also notice my grouping by dates within this table. I thought this was useful so each audit shows up as it’s own group.

I make one of these tables for each platform. Then, I have a more zoomed out ‘Snapshot’ of the average performance in each platform. Check it out: