The Coffee Effect (And How It Affects Your Social Media)

Whenever anyone tells me the main KPIs (“key performance indicators” or basically metrics showing how something is doing) to watch on Social Media is views/likes/comments, it is immediately clear that they have no idea how marketing actually works.

Bold statement? Yes.

True statement? Also yes.

Most marketing efforts may not actually have a direct effect. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t monitor or manage marketing, but at the end of the day, the thing you need to watch no matter what is whatever your goals are for your marketing.

If you want to get event attendees, how many tickets are sold? If you want sponsors, how much money have you raised? If you want sales, how many sales have you made? Maybe high views will get you there. Maybe it won’t. Views is not the metric to monitor. Direct calls from a specific post are also not the thing to monitor. If you made a post and calls went up, that’s what you watch.

And while all of the organizational pieces have to be in place (even if you’re just one person) between a marketing step, a lead coming in, and a sale, social media is probably the least controllable way to market.

That might not be a great thing to say as someone who provides Social Media services as a professional service, but it is the truth. And that is why we care more about how a business or brand is doing holistically and what is happening with their sales overall more than we watch comments, likes, and views.

Never mind the fact that you literally can not control comments, likes, and views. The algorithm does.

There are people online who will tell you how to rig the algorithm, but the truth is literally no one knows outside of the people writing the algorithm’s code. Everyone else is guessing, even if there is an educated bit to the guess, it is still largely a guess, and no one actually knows. As frustrating as it may seem, there is literally nothing you can do aside from create and post engaging and interesting comment, and have strong marketing across your business or brand, and monitor whatever metric reflects your goals.

OK, so what is “The Coffee Effect”?

The Coffee Effect is a tangible example as to how Social Media works, and why breaking your back to create (or replicate) “the perfect post” is almost pointless.

For example: One Friday night a barista is invited to a party they weren’t going to go to. On a totally random whim, they go. They get a little drunker than they planned, and they’re way hung over Saturday morning. They call the barista who usually closes and asks if that person can come in earlier to swap shifts, and they will close, even though they never ever close on Saturday, and the evening barista never opens on Saturday.

Now it’s 11:00AM on Saturday morning and the evening barista is there when a local influencer comes in for their morning coffee. The evening barista has no idea this person comes in each Saturday (or they probably would have asked to switch shifts a long time ago), and they are star struck. The influencer orders their usual small iced coffee, the smitten barista gives them a free upgrade to an extra large.

Now it’s 1:00PM on Saturday afternoon. The influencer drank a lot more coffee then they are used to. Now they have to go to the bathroom, hours earlier than they usually do.

You’ve been over there at your computer trying to decide what time to post, and playing a bit of a Russian Roulette with your scheduling, and you randomly decided to post at 1:05PM that Saturday because the sky is blue.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the influencer follows one of your followers. You posted, the follower saw and liked it, right as the influencer went to the bathroom, saw your post, thought “That’s cool!” and hit “like” and all of a sudden you have one million views and your post blows up and you get a flood of new followers and your social media team (or just you) dives into the great abyss to figure out what magical moment in that post could have possibly made it blow up like that and they break their backs trying to recreate it.

But the whole time, the only reason that specific post blew up was because someone got drunk, someone else had a crush, and someone else had to pee.

And so you went viral.

That’s “The Coffee Effect.”

That’s pretty bleak. How can I ever know what works on Social Media?

Consistency is one way. Post often and see how different posts do. Keep posting.

But more importantly, monitor your goal metrics: If you don’t have millions of views, but you do have rocketing sales, you’re doing something right - keep going!

If you have millions of views, and you’re not getting sales, something is wrong - you need to find out where the breakdown is and fix it.

At the end of the day, you don’t control anything to do with social media beyond trying to keep up with the changes as to how the platforms decide who is going to be pushed out in what feeds and to which people and trying to check those boxes while still sharing your own content. Beyond that, you never know what is going to happen when you make a post!

So just make great content, share it, and keep going!