Social media marketing is a powerful tool in the hands of businesses to grow their brand and distinguish themselves from their competitors in addition to SEO and digital marketing. With the rise in social media marketing, there are plenty of businesses looking out for ways to engage their audience on social media platforms.
Not only this, businesses and marketers also prepare a social media strategy as they are pretty familiar with its importance. But is having social media strategy enough? Have you ever wondered how to check if you are going in the right direction or not?
Testing the performance of your social media strategy is also important to figure out if you are going in the right direction or not. No worries if you have little knowledge of testing your social media performance as we have got you covered.
Here’s how you can test your social media performance.
Social Testing
Before learning how to test your social media performance, you should know what social media testing is. Social testing refers to an experiment that determines if your content is performing among your target audiences or not.
Businesses can test various forms of posts depending on their goals. For instance, if you want to figure out whether video campaigns are worth investing in or not, then you can create a post to measure the impressions of a post.
The interactions will tell you if the video is worth investing in or not and accordingly, you can take the decision.
Steps For Testing Social Media Performance
There are plenty of marketers who have years of experience in digital marketing but when it comes to measuring social media performance, they lack the know-how to do so. Consequently, here are the steps for testing social media performance.
Formulate hypothesis
The first step is to formulate hypotheses. Before you begin testing your social media performance, you need to have a deep knowledge of the overall goals of your business, your social media strategy, your target audience, current social performance, and the questions which you want to test.
Choose a hypothesis that will bring a major impact on your business and social media goals. Running several tests at once may lead to inaccurate results. This is mostly the case with organic social.
You can also make use of tools to learn about your audiences and how each channel is performing. Not only this, you can track social conversations, know the latest trends, and get an insight into customer sentiments.
Consequently, going through all this data will let you know if your content is engaging your audience which in turn will help you to formulate a hypothesis.
Right kind of social experiment
Once you have formulated a hypothesis, the next step is to choose the right type of social media experiment. There are two types of social media experiments to choose from: A/B testing and multivariable testing.
A/B testing is the most common kind of social media experiment where you can change only one variable and keep everything the same. By conducting these tests, you can figure out the improvements to make a measurable impact.
Some A/B tests you can do include video vs a link, long vs short captions, emojis vs hashtags, and others.
Then there is multivariable testing. Multivariable testing refers to altering two or three variables at once. But analyzing and interpreting data can be difficult. The popular multivariable tests include short-form animated video vs long-form action video, multiple calls-to-action buttons with different images, and so on.
Choose metrics and network to test
The next step is choosing metrics and the network you want to test. The key metric includes impressions, traffic towards your website, likes, comments, and shares. As far as the channel is concerned, it depends on what you are testing and the social media platform you are using to post the content.
You can use the network-specific data and make the decision accordingly. Also, make sure to learn about the different types of content that perform best on different platforms.
Decide the duration
Determining the duration of the social media experiment is also a must to test your social media performance. Not deciding the time frame for the social media experiment is the biggest blunder committed by marketers.
The duration of your social media experiment depends on your budget, audience size, and KPIs. in addition to this, the most important factor is statistical significance. It refers to the chances that your test results are the outcome of a defined cause.
Consequently, look for the statistical significance and set a duration. Once you are done testing, optimize the content.
Select variables and control
The next step in testing your social media performance is selecting your variables and control. Consider all elements of content when you are doing A/B testing. Apart from this, selecting your control means the content you’ll keep the same.
For instance, if you are testing the social media performance on images, then make sure not to change the copy, audience, timing, and other things.
Conduct experiment
Finally, you can conduct a social media experiment. But before executing your experiment, make sure to plan, create, optimize, and post your content. You can also use the widely available tools for this.
Things don’t end here. You also need to analyze your social media experiment results along with your paid campaigns.
Analyze and share the results
The next step is reviewing and analyzing the outcomes of your social media performance to identify new opportunities or add insights into your records. You can also create and communicate an effective data story to highlight how your organization can benefit from it.
Final Thoughts
Following the steps outlined below, you can easily conduct a social media performance and figure out the improvements you need to make. Doing so will help you to optimize growth and engagement for your brand.
.