🍴7 reactions. 0 comments. 1 bruised ego.

Last week, I walked you through the Flop Framework. It’s four steps I run through when a post underperforms.

Quick refresher:

I told you I’d run through one of my own flops, so I’m going to put my ego on the shelf and get into it.

Last week I posted this:

I had an idea, so I followed it and put together a quick post.

As you can see, very straightforward with a direct call to action at the end.

Four days later, here's what the analytics showed:

I’m not going to beat around the bush on this one. It sucked.

Let’s run it through the Flop Framework to see where the wheels fell off.

Not even close, 175 impressions is well below my normal range, and that's the first thing the framework asks me to notice.

This is where I have to stop and be honest with myself.

Before I start picking apart the writing, I have to acknowledge that the post never really got served in the newsfeed.

Whatever's wrong with the copy, most of my audience never saw it.

This is a little interesting because the post earned 7 reactions on 175 impressions, which is actually a halfway-decent engagement rate.

That tells me the post didn’t have a hook problem. The opening did enough work for the small audience that saw it.

Without Step 2, I would've blamed my writing and started rewriting hooks for nothing.

Now this is where my ego will take a beating.

Seven reactions, zero comments, zero reposts, zero saves.

I only want that many zeroes at the end of my bank account balance.

That's all passive engagement. People agreed enough to tap a reaction and move on, but nobody felt pulled to add anything, share it with someone else, or come back to it later.

When I read the post again with that in mind, I can see why.

I wrote it as a statement, which, looking back, is likely the issue.

I never gave them a way to get involved. I should've shared a specific example or ended with a question that pulled them in.

There wasn’t any friction.

The post was true, but it didn’t ask the reader to do anything.

Short doesn’t always mean sharp.

With only 7 reactions, there's not enough data here to draw a real audience-fit conclusion.

Step 4 is most useful when you have a meaningful pool of engaged people.

So this step doesn't surface much for this particular post. It’s worth noting, because the framework isn't always going to give you a finding at every step.

Sometimes a step just confirms there's nothing more to learn there, and that's a valid result too.

Beyond my earlier hypothesis of “It sucked,” here’s what I found supported that:

Although the writing quality was strong and the engagement rate held up against distribution, the post's shape was the source of the flop.

It made a statement instead of starting a conversation. That’s something I can fix moving forward.

If I'd skipped the framework and just looked at the headline numbers, I probably would've blamed the hook. The framework kept me honest about what actually went wrong and what didn't.

If a recent post of yours flopped, run it through this framework. You might be surprised at what you find.