Lesson 9 of 10 · 4 min
Measure it, and what to change when it is not working
One sheet, one row per comment. Without it you will remember the two replies and forget the sixty comments, and you will not know which posts, which asks, or which hours are working.
The columns
Date. Post link. Post author. What the post was about, in five words. Which ask you used. Reply from the author (yes/no). Replies from anyone else (count). Connection requests received that day. Leads (someone asked for the free thing). Conversations (someone asked about the paid thing). Clients.
The weekly review
Every Friday, twenty minutes. Which posts got replies: were they from your thirty accounts or from search? Which asks got replies: was it the phrasing or the topic? What time of day? Then change one thing for the following week, not four.
Reading the numbers
- Comments up, replies flat: the comments are not specific enough, or the posts are too old by the time you get there. Re-read lesson four; move to the first two hours.
- Replies up, leads flat: the ask is not compelling, or it is not clearly free. Make the front end more concrete: a number of things, a named outcome.
- Leads up, conversations flat: the front end is not leading anywhere, or you are not following up. Lesson eight, the next two weeks.
- Conversations up, clients flat: this is a sales problem, not a comment problem, and it is out of scope here. The good news is that you have a pipeline.
With the kit
/li-audit reads your own posts’ analytics rather than your comments, and two of its measures carry over to the sheet: rank by rate, not by volume (replies per comment, not comments made), and look for the pattern in your top five against your bottom five before you look at the time of day, which it says is almost never the cause. It also says what this lesson does: with thirty rows you can see a pattern, with six you cannot. /li-plan builds a weekly list of people worth being visible to, which is the same job as the thirty accounts in lesson three; run it on Friday after the review if you want the list refreshed.
Checked The source reports no numbers at all, so there is no benchmark to give you.
“My reply rates and the conversion rates are pretty good as well” is the whole of it. Two screenshots of replies are shown. We have no figure to pass on and will not invent one; the first month of your own sheet is the benchmark, and it will be better than any number from someone else’s niche.
Spotted something wrong in this lesson? Tell us, and we will check it and fix it.