Case Study: Getting Feedback From Your Facebook Community
How a musician learned what his community wants
Yossi Sassi is an oriental rock musician from Israel who loves to experiment, both artistically and entrepreneurially.
In 9 months, he will release a new album, and, for the first time, he decided to document the process and share the insider experience exclusively through his Patreon page.
What should he share, though?
He had some ideas that would be both valuable and fun for his audience, but he was not sure. That’s why we worked together and decided to ask for feedback from his Facebook community, so we could make more well-informed decisions and shape the experience accordingly.
Here’s how Yossi obtained feedback in just a few days, step-by-step. You can follow the exact process for your own projects — it’s that simple.
Step #1: Goal
As I stressed in the essay, defining your goal is the absolute step one. Obtaining feedback won’t help you find out your goals and vision, but outline a plan to achieve them.
In our case, Yossi envisioned to record a new album, to be finished in March 2016, exploring a new direction in his musical journey. Unlike his previous productions, the goal this time was to get early feedback from a core group of committed followers, which could help him reach decisions about his evolving musical creations, while supporting this journey financially.
Step #2: Survey
Next step? To put the survey together. We used Typeform, which helped us create a beautiful survey with unlimited answers.
We knew that, the shorter the survey, the more responses it would get. That’s why Yossi included only 2 short questions:
At the end, we asked the participants to enter their email, so they could be notified first when the Patreon page is live.
The work-in-progress looked like this:
Great, this step didn’t take more than 10 minutes.
Step #3: Facebook posts
The next step was to post the survey to Yossi’s Facebook community. The very same day, Yossi posted it to his Facebook page, without losing time.
His post yielded 10 responses. I thought it was pretty low, considering Yossi’s 8,500 likes.
My suspicion was that:
- Facebook’s fan page organic reach has hit a new low.
- Yossi should have posted a text-only status with the URL of the survey in it, instead of a survey link.
Knowing that some people might have missed it, we scheduled another Facebook post 3 days later, this time on his Facebook profile. This post was text-only.
As we suspected, this post was much more impactful!
It yielded 35+ responses in the first two days (and they kept coming in), as well as insightful comments, like this one.
It seems the text-only format helped rank higher, and Facebook does favour profiles over fan page posts.
The preliminary research gave us 50 responses in total, which helped us consider options for the creation of the insider experience.
As Yossi mentioned in a comment:
“[Feedback] is not about distracting you from your path, but rather helping you sharpen it. You may discover things totally out of your path/goal, yet worth checking, and sometimes leading to new horizons worth exploring.”
Step #4: Feedback analysis
The response reached an astonishing tie!
Except for the poll results, Yossi also received additional informative suggestions on new insider experiences we could create. He exported them in a spreadsheet and filtered the interesting ideas to be discussed in our next meeting.
In my opinion, this was the most important bit of the survey: allowing the fans to express their own ideas, in their own words.
Yossi also had access to his metrics, which revealed that 30% of the visitors actually completed the survey:
What could this mean? That the survey could be better optimised to drive more responses, although a 30% is not a bad ratio at all.
It’s important to know that indeed the survey took an average of 3 minutes to be completed. As a rule of thumb, the more time people spend to provide feedback, the more committed they are to support.
Next steps
The survey is over and the posts are buried deep down in Yossi’s timeline, but everything starts now.
After the meeting we’ll have with Yossi, we’ll put together the pledge levels and rewards of his insider experience, as well as the video pitch. Once the page is completed, the audience will be able to enjoy Yossi’s creative process by supporting his journey from $1 to $500 — and getting exclusive rewards in exchange.
The cool thing about the survey? We asked for people’s email addresses. They will be added to Yossi’s ~2,000 people email list.
This way, the fans who committed in responding, will have access FIRST, prior to the public announcement. When Yossi’s project hits his mailing list, social media and the press, he will have already his first supporters on board, helping build momentum. 50 supportive fans is not a bad place to start.
At least it won’t look like a ghost town, like most campaigns do, driving people away..
Tommy Darker is the writing alter ego of an imaginative independent musician and thinker about the future of the music industry. His vision is to simplify scalable concepts and make them work for independent musicians.
He is a writer about the movement of the #Musicpreneur and founder of Darker Music Talks, a global series of discussions between experts and musicians. He and his work have been featured in Berklee, TEDx, Berlin Music Week, ReThink Music, Midem, SAE Institute, University of Westminster, Hypebot and Topspin Media.
