A social report gets read by people who were never in the comments: a client, a brand team, a leadership group with a few minutes and a decision to make. Which means that whatever sits in the summary line is what they walk away with.

That’s why phrases like “mostly positive” or “good engagement” cause problems. Each can be accurate, which is part of how they get through reviews. But they stop one step before the part the reader actually needs, and the reader is left to either guess what to do or ask the analyst to go back in.

Here’s how to turn these empty phrases into actionable insights.

Positive comments can be praising very different things. Group them by what they’re actually responding to and a pattern usually shows up. For example, a large share of commenters might be reminiscing on old campaigns, old products, or “the good old days” more than they’re talking about the post in front of them.

In that case, “praise centered on nostalgia” gives the team something real to work with. It points to an audience attached to the past, and it raises the question of whether new content is being measured against it. “Mostly positive”, meanwhile, raises no questions at all.

A high comment count tells you that people showed up, but it tells you nothing about why - or what they talked about once they were there.

If the thread drifted into something unrelated to the content, the volume is inflating a number that doesn’t reflect real interest in the post or the brand. “Conversation was active, but brand relevance was low” tells a very different story from “good engagement”, and it leads to a different next step.

FYI, this is the reason Relevance is one of the three signals behind the Siftsy Score. A busy comment section and a relevant one can look identical from the outside.

Counting the negative comments only tells you how many there are. Reading what they have in common tells you what to do with them.

Take a post where criticism is spread across a dozen complaints. If a third of those mention a price change, the report line becomes “Price drove 34% of criticism”. That’s a specific, fixable problem that can be handed to the people who own pricing. “Some negative comments” can’t be handed to anyone.

Look at the three rewrites side by side and each one does the same thing. It stops simply describing the mood of the comment section, and names what’s behind it: nostalgia, drifting relevance, price. That shift is what gives a reader something they can act on, because a cause can be responded to in a way a vibe can’t.

Before a line like “mostly positive” goes into a deck, ask what’s driving it and whether you can put a number on it. If the answer changes what the client does next, that’s the line that belongs in the summary.

Report the why, and the sentiment label becomes the supporting detail.

What if the best brand account you have doesn’t look like a brand account at all?

Metricool are looking at the brands going incognito on social: a Starbucks barista who became its Global Coffee Creator, a former Staples employee who turned into the brand’s biggest presence on social, and a Toronto coffee roaster whose personal account is 20 times the size of her brand’s.

And - as we already know - it’s the comments that really prove the value of these accounts.

What the Siftsy team has been reading, saving, and talking about this week.