The job of a social media manager is about more than posting memes and sharing dog reels all day with their followers. As a social media manager, you have one goal, which is marketing your brand on social media. For some individuals, this comes as naturally as it can. For others, it might look like they are going in circles and can’t reach their desired goal.
When it comes to measuring the performance of your social media campaigns or experiments, things might look more challenging than you think them to be. But finding the outcome of your social media experiment is one of the most important things that will lead to the improvement of your present and future social media goals. Today, with the help of this article, we are aiming to unfold the secrets of running and measuring social media experiments that bring fruitful results to you on social networking sites.
Steps Required For Running A Successful Social Media Experiment
#1 Come Up With A Set Of Goals
When you are experimenting with your social media posting, you need to put an identifiable goal with it as well. This will help you in coming up with the variables such as how much the post should be getting impressions, likes, shares, comments, and more.
Besides this, in case you are running ads, you must be able to identify in which direction your ads are being played. With the implementation of focused goals, you will find how easy it is for you to analyze the results and see if the experiment is a success or not.
#2 Find Out Your Preferred Audience
If you are thinking about performing a social media experiment, first target the specific set of audiences that you think is best for your brand. Without having particular knowledge of your audience, your data won’t sit particularly well with the audience persona. As a result, you will not get valuable insights, and there will be no way the results will come out accurately based on the audience segment.
#3 Come Up With Experiment Ideas
Once you are done setting your goals and marking out your preferred audience for the experiment, it is time to find new ideas by forming a hypothesis as to how the experiment idea is going to help you with your goal. For example, you need to think like this:
If we are able to gather top content from other Instagram brand pages,
Then we will be able to grow our social media engagement as well by 10%,
because this type of content has already been proven fruitful for their respective social media brands.
#4 Take A Note Of Your Current Performance
Before you think about running the social media experiment, you have to come up with the base reading that is your current performance. Then, when the experiment is complete, you get to compare the results and will be able to make better decisions. On the other hand, even if your goals are different from your previous marketing campaign, it is still a great idea to take a step back and refer to the old campaign results for context.
For example, your new social media experiment deals with testing better conversions rather than engagement. But having an idea of what excites the audience will be preferable to structure your latest experiment.
#5 Set Priority In Your Experiment
After coming up with a bunch of new ideas that you can test out in your new social media experiment, it is time for you to prioritize your ideas. One of the most common ways to prioritize your ideas is by following the ICE score developed by GrowthHackers. ICE stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease.
For each experiment idea, you need to give each factor a score of 10. The overall score of the idea depends after you take the average of the three scores. Once this is done, the idea that has the highest score should be put on a top priority of your social media experiment.
#6 Find The Right Social Media Measurement Tools
See, the thing is, no one is born an expert in social media tools. That is why you need a particular set of social media analytics tools that are going to help you with accurately tracking down the performance of your social media experiment.
Find out what measurement tools are aligned with your set of needs. What type of information will be helpful for optimizing your social media campaigns? Always start small if you have yet to learn what is best for you. This way, you will not be overspending your money on tools that are too complex for your usage.
#7 Start The Test
Once all of the above steps are done, all you need to do is start the test. But there are a few things that you should know about before you begin the test.
The first is to test one thing at a time to find out what is making the difference clearly. For example, if you are experimenting with your copy, keeping the photos or videos in a similar fashion is the way to proceed forward. Otherwise, it will be next to impossible to find out whether the copy or the photos were the cause of outperformance.
Look at the correct metrics when you are measuring results and analyzing data. You need to look at the goals you have set. For example, if you are thinking about increasing your engagement on social media, then you need metrics that point to outreach and impressions over clicks.
Lastly, you need to run each of your experiments for at least a week for measurement tools to gather a sufficient amount of data. For bigger-than-average social experiments, we would like you to wait for at least a month or a quarter. The bigger the social media experiment is, the longer you should wait for the test to finish.
#8 Analyze Your Results
After the experiment is complete, you need to see whether the experiment was fruitful or not. Look at the statistics to pinpoint the areas of improvement. This way, you will understand whether it’s an actual result and not a fluke making sure that the same can be repeated successfully.
#9 Repeat
Please keep on repeating the same social experiment, again and again, a few times to see if the results are near the same or different. If the results are the same and quite your liking, then you can add them to your regular part of social media marketing.
#10 Automate Top-performing Ideas
Once you are able to get consistent results from your specific social media experiment, you can make the best of that one experiment by automating it. Even if you are not able to automate the whole process, you can automate the chunks of it to make your work easier. After the procedure is successfully automated, it will save lots of your time, which will help you in focusing on other vital aspects of social media marketing.
#11 A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of the critical elements of finding real-time opportunities of targeting your audience in the right way. In addition, with A/B testing, you get to make changes to your social media marketing campaigns and strategies on the go, as it shows the specific type of content which your audience prefer from you. Also, Itis different for each social media platform. As a result, the same defining points of Twitter campaign testing are not valid for Instagram A/B testing.
With this, you will be able to dig out crucial insights that work best for you on a social platform. But remember that you need to continue your A/B testing with minor variations. This is because the algorithm of social platforms is constantly changing. The same thing is said for social media trends as well. Thus, continuous research in A/B testing is a must for a social media marketer.
Wrapping Up
There are a number of possibilities, ideas, and experiments waiting for you to test out on your social media. One more thing before we sign off, social media trends are constantly changing. Thus, it is always a good idea to perform experimentation every once in a while to stay ahead of your competitors. Lastly, keep an eye on your social media analytics and then be open to making a few tweaks whenever it is required. This way, you will be able to attain the best results from your social media experimentation.
