Experiment with ideas. Test and see which works better. Analyze your data.
These are phrases we often use on this blog. To us, social media marketing is a bit of a science. We recommend testing things, running experiments, and analyzing data — because it worked for us. This experimental mindset has helped us grow our social media results.
But one thing we haven’t done well is to explain the how: how to run social media experiments.
In this post, you’ll learn the six simple steps of running social media experiments. We’ve even included 87 ideas, which you can start testing immediately.
How to run social media experiments successfully
Running social media experiments can be hard when you’re not sure where to start and where to head to. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you hit the ground running.
Before we dive into the guide, here’s a quick caveat: social media experiments are not perfect or entirely scientific. Some factors are out of our control, such as organic reach since it’s determined by the social media algorithms.
This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t get meaningful results (it has worked for us and many others); it’s just good to be mindful of this while running your experiments.
1. Set goals
As with most planning, it’s crucial to start by setting your goals. Why?
Imagine the following situation. Both social media posts are sharing the same blog post with a different headline.
Post A received 100 Likes, 100 shares, 10 clicks, and 5,000 impressions.
Post B received 10 Likes, 10 shares, 100 clicks, and 1,000 impressions.
Which post do you think is better?
I think it depends on your goals! If you think social media is for engagement, you’ll likely prefer Post A. But if you think social media is for driving traffic, you’ll probably prefer Post B instead.
Here’s a list of social media goals you could choose from:
- Reach (or impressions)
- Engagement (Likes, comments, and shares)
- Following
- Traffic from social media
- Leads from social media
- Revenue from social media
For us, our overarching goal for social media is engagement and brand-building. (Here’s why.) So we focus more on our social media reach, engagement, and following than traffic, leads, or revenue from social media.
Having said that, each social media post can sometimes have its own micro-goal. For example, while our overall social media goal is engagement and majority of our posts are meant for generating engagement, we have some posts that are meant for driving traffic, such as this and this.
2. Brainstorm ideas
Once you have set your goals, you are ready to come up with ideas. While you are thinking of new ideas, it’ll be good if you could form a hypothesis around the idea, too. This is the format we like to use1:
If we (experiment idea),
then (expected results),
because (assumptions).
If we curate top content from other Facebook Pages,
then we can grow our Facebook reach by 10%,
because they are content proven to be popular.
You could also keep it as simple as “Curating top third-party content will increase our reach on Facebook.”
Here are a few suggestions for coming up with social media experiment ideas:
Read blog posts for ideas
This is my favorite method because there’s so much written about social media marketing every day. Listicles and case studies of successful social media tactics can be a great source of inspiration for experiment ideas.
If you want somewhere to get started, we have quite a few blog posts with experiment ideas in them:
There’s also a huge list of 100 social media experiment ideas below. Click here to skip right to it, and feel free to take any of the ideas.
The second method is to follow social media trends.
For example, videos are becoming the most popular content format on social media. Facebook has been pushing for videos on its platform for the last few years, and LinkedIn has recently introduced native videos. Our internal data also showed that videos received an average of 873 interactions per post, compared with 279 for photos and 190 for text posts.
So it’ll be a good idea to test videos on your social media profiles.
We recently wrote about the 10 major social media trends for 2018, which you might find useful for generating ideas.
What ideas can you think of in light of these trends?
Study industry leaders and competitors
The final method is to watch and learn from the best companies in your industry and your competitors. What have they been doing that is worth trying yourself?
It’s also good to be aware that the ideas that worked for them might not always work for you….
