Produce a monthly review that turns your numbers into decisions for next month.
Once a month, spend about half an hour looking at what you posted, deciding what the numbers say, and changing next month's plan because of it. This is a monthly review, and most people who post regularly never do one.
Without a review, each new video is based on whatever idea feels good that week. A year later, people in that habit are making the same kind of content with the same results and can't say what has worked. Looking back at the numbers every month breaks that loop, and your first review follows the five steps below.
Open the sheet you set up in lesson 9.2, "Compare posts fairly and look for patterns". Add a row for every post from the last month. You need at least eight. If you posted fewer than eight last month, include earlier posts and note at the top of the sheet that the review covers a longer period.
Give each row four tags: pillar, format, hook type and length. Then fill in the main numbers for each post: reach, average watch time, saves, shares and profile actions.
Add four more columns. The first two are the fair-comparison columns shown in lesson 9.2: watch time as a share of the video's length, and saves per 1,000 views. The third is messages or enquiries, taken from your log. The fourth is sales, if any came from social.
Priya runs a centre whose customers are parents. Her first review covered nine posts from her first month.
Decide what "top" and "bottom" mean before you sort. For most small businesses the best measure is the one closest to sales, which is profile actions and messages. When those numbers are too small to separate one post from another, use saves per 1,000 views or watch time as a second measure. Then sort the sheet and pick out your top three and bottom three posts.
For each of the six, write one sentence on why it did well or badly. Check the tags first: did the top three share a pillar, a format or a hook type? Then rewatch each of the bottom three and look at its retention graph to see where viewers left.
Your reasons can be guesses, as long as you label them as guesses. The review is where you form ideas, and next month is where you test them.
Priya's top three were all teaching videos with mistake hooks, and two of them brought in messages from parents. Her bottom three included both of her talking-to-camera videos about the centre's history. She wrote a one-sentence reason for each post and labelled every reason as a guess.
Make three decisions: one keep, one change and one stop. Keep is something working that should continue or grow. Change is something that might work better with one adjustment. Stop is something not working and not worth adjusting.
Each decision has to be specific enough that next month you can check whether you carried it out. Three is enough. With more, you can't tell next month which change made the difference.
Priya made these three:
Keep: the teaching pillar at two posts a fortnight, with mistake hooks. Change: turn the centre-history videos into a reply format, answering a real parent's question about why the centre was started, with the question on screen as the hook. Stop: holiday greetings, which took time and got almost no reach, saves or messages.
Decisions left in the review sheet change nothing, so apply them to your plan. Open the content pillars you set in lesson 2.4 and the 30-day calendar you made in lesson 6.4.
To grow a pillar, give it more slots in the calendar. To change a format, update the ideas that use it. To stop something, delete it from the calendar and move its slots to something that works.
At the bottom of the review, write the month's totals from your log: how many conversations started on social, and how many of those became customers. Over a few months, this line shows whether social media is worth the hours you spend on it. Views can rise while enquiries stay flat, and enquiries can rise while views fall, and only the log shows which is happening.
Priya's first month brought six enquiries from social and two trial lessons. The numbers were small, and they gave her a baseline to measure every following month against.
When you finish, you should have a review sheet covering at least eight posts with tags and numbers, your top three and bottom three each with a one-line reason, three specific decisions, an updated calendar, and a line recording enquiries and sales from social.
Now run yours: complete the monthly review sheet for at least eight posts and write three decisions for next month's calendar.
Fill in a monthly review sheet for at least eight posts, then write three decisions for next month's calendar.
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