INBOX INSIGHTS, January 26, 2022: Process Documentation, Analytics Amnesty, Instagram Brand Content

Posted on January 26, 2022 by cspenn

INBOX INSIGHTS: Process Documentation, Analytics Amnesty, Instagram Brand Content (1/26) :: View in browser

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Documenting Your Processes

Over the past week, my laptop has been stuck in a 4-hour reboot cycle, I've lost the ability to use my keyboard, and my audio automatically mutes on calls.

Needless to say, technology has not been on my side this week.

My tasks have fallen behind and I've had to reach out to my team to help me get things done.

Thankfully, we've taken the time to create repeatable processes and documentation for a lot of what we do at Trust Insights. I was able to ask for help and point to a standard operating procedure for how to do the task. But it got me thinking, is that normal?

So here is the "so what?" this week – when was the last time you documented your processes?

If the answer is "never" you might be in trouble.

I hear you. I've been there, feeling like there is no consistency to what I do so I cannot possibly document it. Or I'm so busy that I cannot take the time to write down what I do.

I'm sure you already know where this is going. You have to make time for documentation and you have to find the repeatability. Why? It will allow you to do a couple of things:

Automate

By finding the repeatability in the tasks that you perform you can find opportunities to automate some of what you do. Automation is your friend. I promise. Automating your tasks does not automate you out of a job. What it does is give you back time to do deeper thinking, build relationships, discover insights, and make plans.

Scale

Repeatability and documentation allow you to scale. We just talked about how automation is your friend. It is not only your friend to help you get out of the trenches of doing the same thing over and over, but you can also think about scaling what you're doing. Automation of repetitive tasks will allow you to let the machines produce more. The consistency and the documentation are the instructions, the machines just need to follow the blueprint. Machines aside, it will help you significantly and save you time when you're onboarding new team members. Proper documentation of how you do things will allow a new team member to train up quickly and be productive, faster.

Delegate

I don't know about you, but I love delegating. I especially love delegating things that I don't enjoy. Before you can delegate, you need to have instructions on how to do the task. Do you see a pattern here? Repeatability and documentation will allow you to teach someone else how to do your tasks the way that you were doing them. Doesn't that sound great?

I know that I'm probably in the minority of people who enjoy thorough documentation (or maybe I'm not – let's be friends). However, writing down the steps of what you do will save you time and aggravation when you need help from someone else. Had I not had some documentation on how tasks are complete I wouldn't have been able to ask for help when my technology failed. Well, I could ask for help but the time it would take to explain the tasks would not have helped move them forward any faster.

Do you love documentation? Do you have questions about how to find repeatability in your tasks?

Come find me in our Free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers »

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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Binge Watch and Listen

In this week's episode, Katie and Chris examine the concept of analytics amnesty as part of change management. When you know things are wrong or broken, and you're committed to making a change for the better, you may need to declare amnesty – a reboot that removes any and all blame for the way things used to be. Learn more about analytics amnesty and what obstacles you might encounter as part of your change management efforts.

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Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live show, we looked at social media marketing and some current strategies. Catch the replay here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we'll be looking at business process re-engineering. What the heck is it, besides an expensive consulting word?

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week's Data Diaries, it's a new year, new you, right? Let's see what the new year holds for marketers on Facebook's Instagram platform for unpaid content.

First, let's take a look at unpaid brand performance for the last two months:

Instagram Brand Performance

What we see is the usual slowdown during the holidays – brand performance always seems to suffer, in part because individual people share more content during the holidays, drowning out unpaid brand content, and because brands (especially B2C) focus their efforts on advertising.

As of right now, unpaid brand content hovers around an average of 0.2% engagement per post; in other words, 1 in 500 followers engages with a piece of content.

When we break this out by content type, we see a bit more nuance:

Instagram brand performance by content type

We see that for brands, video content is what drags down the overall performance. Albums (carousels) still perform the best in aggregate for brands to garner engagement of content.

So what? In terms of Instagram performance for unpaid content, brands may want to consider alternate avenues for reaching their followers, such as advertising or influencer marketing. At the very least, make albums/carousels your preferred format for posting, to increase the chances of audiences engaging with your content.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 448,349 unique Instagram posts from 7,291 brands on Instagram using Meta's Crowdtangle software. The timeframe of the data is December 1, 2021 – January 25, 2022. The date of study is January 26, 2022. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.

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