With Facebook, we use FB insights and business manager that tracks impressions, demographics, etc. You then have a better idea of your base and what direction to advertise. You want to throw money at a successful strategy so if you know your target, it’s more valuable to make it a concerted than to advertise wildly.

With Twitter, you can use an app like Hootsuite to schedule the posts and collect data. There are a lot of apps that do this. It’ll track responses, retweets, and also the demographics of the people reacting to your posts. There are higher end applications that have stronger analytics and I don’t doubt that some can judge negative and positive reactions to your posts based on responses by demographic.

Most these social platforms are free and what they do is harvest data. I believe Facebook has something like 40k data points on every person on their platform and 25k data points on people who don’t even use Facebook. They track using a web Pixel and every person is assigned a tracking number. That’s how you see ads related to your searches across platforms. I’m sure Reddit has a pixel and is also tracking our data.

You then review the positive and negative interactions and craft the narrative that people want to see more of.

It’s like with restaurants. If you keep posting low quality pictures even though you think it’s high quality, you’ll see the lack of interest. Say you finally decided to post a different type of image and it goes viral. You study the differences and post more of what works.