The Post That Brought Six Enquiries

Work it out before repeating it

A post that performs far beyond the others is worth understanding, and the instinct is to make more like it immediately.

That frequently produces a run of similar posts that do nothing, because the thing that made it work was not the thing you copied.

Half an hour spent establishing what actually happened is worth more than a month of imitation.

And the honest answer is occasionally that you cannot repeat it, which is also useful to know.

The candidate explanations

• One person shared it to a large audience.
• It landed in a group where somebody was asking.
• The timing matched a seasonal need.
• The subject was one people act on.
• The format suited the platform that week.
• Chance, which is a real answer.

The first two are the most common and the least repeatable. A post that reached ten times the usual audience because one well-connected person shared it tells you about that person rather than about the post.

Check the reach before the content

Since that separates two very different situations.

If the post reached roughly your usual audience and produced six enquiries, the content did the work and is worth studying.

If it reached ten times the usual number and produced six enquiries, the distribution did the work and the content converted at your ordinary rate.

Those need completely different responses, and the numbers are both available in the platform's own figures.

Most businesses skip this step and study the wording of a post that was simply seen by more people.

Look at reach, shares, and where the shares came from, in that order.

A worked example

A business had a post produce six enquiries after months of nothing.

The reach was about four times normal, and almost all of it traced to one share by a local community page with a large following.

The post itself was an ordinary photograph of a finished job with two sentences about what had been difficult.

So the content was fine and the distribution was the event, and forty more posts like it would have reached the usual two hundred people.

What they took from it was that the local page shared it, so they now send that page anything genuinely interesting.

That relationship has produced more than any change to their posting would have.

Ask the people who enquired

Which settles it faster than any analysis.

Six enquiries is six conversations, and asking what prompted them takes a sentence each.

The answers frequently reveal that four of the six had been aware of you for months and the post was simply the reminder.

That reframes the post as the last step in a longer process rather than as the cause, which changes what you conclude entirely.

It also tells you where they saw it, which is occasionally not where you posted it.

This is the same direct question that answers most measurement problems in this subject.

Write down what was different

While you still remember, since a month later you will not.

The subject, the format, the day and time, whether it was a question or a statement, whether it showed work or explained something.

Three or four lines in the same record as everything else.

After several such posts you have a pattern rather than an anecdote, and a pattern is something you can act on.

One outlier tells you almost nothing and four tell you what your audience responds to.

That takes two years to accumulate and it is the only reliable version of this.

Do not abandon what you were doing

Which is the common overreaction.

A single strong result is weak evidence, and rebuilding a year of posting around it is a large bet on one observation.

Keep doing what you were doing, add slightly more of whatever this was, and watch whether the next few perform.

If the format genuinely works, it will show up again within a few months.

If it does not, you have lost nothing by not having reorganised everything.

Repost it later

A practical step that is frequently better than making a new one.

Most of your audience did not see it the first time, since reach is a fraction of followers.

Posting the same thing again six months later, with a slightly different opening line, reaches a mostly different set of people.

That is not lazy and it is the ordinary way a post with real value gets seen by everybody it should reach.

Keep a short list of the posts worth repeating, since otherwise nobody remembers them.

Six enquiries is not six jobs

Worth checking before drawing any conclusion about what the post was worth.

Enquiries generated by a widely shared post are frequently lower quality than your usual ones, because they come from people who were not looking and are simply curious about a price.

Follow them through and count how many became work, which is the figure that decides whether this was a good week or a busy one.

A post producing six enquiries and no jobs has cost you an afternoon of quoting, which is a real cost rather than a success.

Record the outcome beside the post in the same note, so the next outlier can be judged against something.

The counter-case

Sometimes it really was the content.

A post answering a question everybody has, or showing something genuinely unusual, can perform on its own merits and be worth building on.

Over-analysing also has a cost, and a business that spends a week on forensics rather than posting again has traded activity for understanding.

And six enquiries is a small sample, which limits what any analysis can establish.

Check the reach first, ask the six people what prompted them, write down what was different, and change very little.

The half hour

1. Check the reach against your usual.
2. Look at who shared it.
3. Ask the six what prompted them.
4. Separate content from distribution.
5. Write down what was different.
6. Change very little.
7. Add it to the repost list.

Step four is the one that decides everything, since a post seen by four times the usual audience tells you about the sharing rather than about the writing.

The opposite case is covered in the post that brought traffic and no enquiries.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.