In an earlier post we spoke about prioritizing user success, in this post we look at how we can measure success on the main video platforms.
Big platforms are general content creation & distribution platforms. How-tos are a big part of their content, but they are not built to understand if the how-to is completed. As how-to creators, while reach, engagement and views are important economically, it is good to know that our content is being used successfully. In this article, we look at each of the major platforms to see how we can build a picture of our completion success rate.
Ask Your Audience: Create a post or story asking your followers for feedback on your how-to through the comments or DMs Did they complete? Was everything clear? etc. Remember, Instagram stories only last for 24 hours, so it doesn’t give a lot of time for feedback.
Create An Instagram Poll: Instagram stories allow you to create polls where you can ask a direct yes or no question to see if users & followers have completed your how-to. Again, Stories only last for 24 hours, and you want to give people time to do your how-to, so make the poll some time after the original post, as you want to give time for people to complete it.
Use An External Survey Tool: Create a survey with an external survey tool, ask your audience if they have completed your how-to, link the survey in your bio and an a Instagram story to reach as many people as possible. You can see how many people clicked your link through Instagram Analytics, the survey tool will give how many have answered!
Use Instagram Analytics: Instagram Analytics won’t give us how many people have completed our how-tos but they will allow us paint a picture of the behaviours they point to completion.
- Reach: Amount of unique accounts that have seen your post.
- Engagement rate: How your audience responds to your post in the form of likes, comments and saves. Saves is perhaps the best indicator here, as a save on a how-to could be interpreted as ‘I want to come back and do this’.
- Traffic: How many clicks you get on your link in your bio and on link stickers on stories.
Ask For A Share: Ask your audience to share their completed work after following your how-to by sending you a direct message or creating a post or story and tagging you in them.
Create A Hashtag: Create a unique hashtag and encourage your audience to use it when they’ve completed your how-to. There is a risk that other profiles will use the hashtag, so over time it will become less useful.
TikTok
Ask Your Viewers: Post a video asking your viewers for feedback on your how-to through comments or direct messages. To make the video more interesting it would be good to highlight others who have already created the how-to.
Create A TikTok Poll: The Stickers option let you create polls within your TikTok videos, where you can ask your viewers if they’ve completed your how-to. TikTok polls only last for 24 hours, so don’t expect great results.
Use An External Survey Tool: Ask your viewers if they have completed your how-to using an external survey tool, link the survey in the biography of your profile. Make a TikTok video about the survey so your viewers know where to find it.
Use TikTok Duets & TikTok Stitch: Encourage your viewers to use the Duet or Stitch feature on TikTok to show their final project after following your how-to. This isn’t precise data but a great way to build your following and focus viewers on doing!
Use TikTok Analytics: Track the following metrics to get a picture of the completion success rate of your how-to.
- Engagement: Video views, profile views, likes, comments and shares.
- Video Analysis:
- Reached audience: How many unique accounts that have seen your video
- Average watch time: Average time people spend watching a video
- Watched full video: The number of times the whole video was watched
- Saves: Amount of viewers who saved your video. This doesn’t say that they have completed the how-to, but it does show an intent on the user to come back to it.
Ask Your Viewers to Share: Encourage viewers to share their completed work after following your how-to by sending a direct message or posting a video and tagging you.
Create A Hashtag: Create a unique hashtag and encourage your viewers to use it when they have completed your how-to. Remember that once created, others will use the hashtag to drive their views, not necessarily because they have completed.
YouTube
Ask Your Viewers: At the end of each video ask your viewers and followers to post a message in the comments. Invent a short format so they can just add it quickly, something like “I made it and it was XXXX! “, remember to follow up on these comments. Reinforce this message in the comments and Community tab and highlight members who have completed the how-to.
Use YouTube Cards: This function lets you create a poll or link to an external website where you can ask your viewers if they have completed your how-to. To see the results of the poll, you will have to take it yourself, but I assume you’ve completed your how-to 🙂
Post A Poll Under The Community Tab: If you have more than 500 subscribers, YouTube allows you to create a post with a poll under the Community tab. Not only does the poll allow you to get feedback on completion, but it helps boost your channel and engagement.
Use An External Survey Tool: Create a survey through an external survey tool, ask your viewers if they have completed your how-to and add a link in your video’s description.
Use YouTube Analytics: YouTube Analytics has lots of data:
- Engagement: How your viewers responds to your videos in the form of likes, dislikes and comments.
- Unique viewers: Amount of unique individuals who have watched your video.
- Average View Duration: The total watch time divided by the total number of views on a video. To use as an indicator of how-to completion we want this number to be high as possible.
- Re-watches: How many times people re-watch specific parts of your video. This is a great indicator of completion, it suggests that they have gone back to follow.
- Views Per Unique Viewers: An interesting data point, the higher this is suggests that people are coming back to the video.
- Keywords: The most popular queries guiding viewers to your videos. Queries relating to your how-to give you an idea that users have landed on your video with the intention of following it.
Pin Comment: Write and pin a comment below your video to ask your viewers to post a comment if they have completed your how-to.
There is no requirement of having a YouTube account when watching videos on the platform. Although, it is required when answering polls and interacting with likes, comments, etc. so some of your viewers might not be able to interact.
Conclusion
None of the things that we have seen will give you a precise number of who is completing your how-to, however it will give you a better overall impression, and feedback on which you can act.
The key is to make asking users & followers if they have completed your how-to part of your process. This means that for every how-to, or at least for many, there should be:
- The Original how-to
- The Check-in: who’s made it? How’d it go?
- The Follow-up post highlighting users
This also allows you to create more content from the original idea and you will learn a lot about the impact of what you do and you will help create a sense of community with your followers.
