TL;DR on learnings:
During the course of S16, we decided to run a “content experimentation process,” where we posted a number of different content types to view the success of each, tracking the metrics and the response from our audience.
- There was a noticeable pattern in blog articles, where some performed better than others (see S16 Content Metrics Review below).
- From these learnings, we have decided to end the “experimentation phase” and reframe the type of content we’ll be publishing come S17, see Content we’ll be driving more of in S17.
- For S17, we should also think about what we are measuring. There is super curated content that’s important to track, but also a lot of random stuff being posted that is not crucial to our success.
- We are going to be focusing our content efforts to cater towards answering program managers’ needs. This will become our main audience.
For simplicity sake, we are defining a piece of content as “successful” in Season 16 for a particular metric if the number is higher than the Season 15 average, unless oth.
*Note: Twitter threads vary a lot - some gets 15k + average. Others 3k. We should discuss if we want to keep tracking this metric as it’s not precise for measuring our success in a season.
**Note: This metric also varies a lot. Would suggest only tracking content with the intention of driving clicks. Some very important posts received a much higher CTR and the average.
***Note: Missing data for 29 days of the season.
Many pieces of content will have ADDITIONAL metrics we care about, like how many leads the piece generated toward one of our protocols.
S16 Content Metrics Review:
These were some high-level findings:
Notes:
- Regen-type content pieces performed poorly
- More educational-type content did not perform as good as we had anticipated
- Product updates and announcements got the highest engagement rates
- Grantee to Funder pieces don’t perform very well, but because these are pieces that our partners ask of us, I suggest we continue with them either way. Perhaps there is a way to increase the engagement. We are actively looking into this.
According to our audience, I have suggested that we move away from educational, regen-type pieces and rather focus our blog on product updates, announcements, case studies and more research-heavy technical pieces. I feel that this will drive more engagement and it speaks more directly to our engaged audience.
Email:
To view all stats on email, please visit the Google Sheets for the full summary.
We are actively looking at an updated and more robust email strategy for the upcoming season.
What we set out to experiment on in S16:
(See notes for each)
What will drive the experiments we’ll be initiating?
For one, Survey Results, and the metrics met or not met per experiment/experiment series. Example:
Note: Even though our survey results illustrated that people were interested in regen web3 ecosystem, those posts did not receive a lot of engagement at all.
At the bottom of each blog post, we can include a survey just for that blog post that asks them:
- Did they get value from the post, from 1-5
- Open response to the above
- Voting on a few content ideas we have
- here’s an example of a question we asked in a past survey
- here’s an example of a question we asked in a past survey
- What audience they fall under if any (1, 2, or 3)
- See The Three (or Four) Audiences MMM Should Care Most About
- This question helps us understand if our intended audiences of a piece are seeing it and getting value from it
Note: The above has not been implemented yet. Still discussing whether to start implementing this in the next season.
Note: some might consider everything in the Content Schedule an experiment, including protocol and program marketing. Regardless of whether you do, we will be monitoring the same metrics for this content as well.
Content we’ll be driving more of in S17:
Our main audience that we will be focusing on in the upcoming season will be program managers.
There will also be a clear focus on community engagement
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Product updates
- We will be pushing more of this content over the next season, as S17 is where a lot of products are going to be launched and we feel this is where our focus on the blog should lie.
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Case studies
- This ties in to our products’ evolution, as well as the progression of where Gitcoin is moving towards. Creating more case studies (for eg. how Gitcoin Passport was integrated in the Gitcoin Program Alpha Round and the statistics associated with it) will provide a deeper understanding of how our products work and their capabilities.
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Research-heavy blog articles
- From recent learnings, it’s clear that our audience does not engage with entry-level educational pieces, so we will be driving more technical/research-heavy material.
- For eg, tied into Allo protocol, we are setting out to create a series of deeply researched pieces on grants programs and their intricacies.
- These types of pieces will allow us to explore further content such as ecosystem growth as a whole, which ties into what we’re building.
- Grantee success. How-to’s, how to be as successful as possible. For Eg, The Anatomy of a Good Grant. Diving into it with successful grantees into what they did to create their success.
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Supporting the upcoming Grants Program/Festival launch
- We will be supporting the relaunch of our Grants Program in April through a variety of content.
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Requested content from partners
- These include Grantee to Funder pieces, which are requested from the funders themselves. We should still push these even though they get low engagement rates. Usually, they are a pretty light lift.
- For all requests, they do go through a process which depends on the availability of the team etc.
For a full scope of upcoming content (calendar constantly being updated), please see Content Pipeline (with the “publication calendar” as default view).