The Ultimate Guide to Social Testing
As marketers, we know the importance of making data-driven decisions. The more information we have about our audience, the more we’re able to make effective marketing moves.
In addition, having the numbers to back up the implementation of a marketing strategy is almost as important as the strategy itself. One of the ways to get this data is through social media testing, where you figure out what campaigns resonate most with your audience and help you meet your marketing goals.
In this post, learn how you can run a social media test to help you meet your marketing goals and discover high-quality tools that will help you do so.
For instance, you might run a social test to learn if video campaigns are worth investing in on Facebook, so you create a post that measures impressions of an ad with and without a video attached. After the campaign, the interactions with your post will tell you if a video is a worthwhile investment for your brand, which makes this process so important.
The Benefits of Social Testing
Social media testing is important because it provides data-driven insights about your social media marketing activities. It allows you to analyze how different variables, like photo and video, affect performance.
Ultimately, social media tests provide data about how audience behavior can influence the structure of your campaigns. You’ll get a picture of what is successful for your brand, and you can create campaigns that you know will work. Instead of researching countless industry benchmarks, you’ll have concrete data specific to your business that comes from testing results.
There are multiple types of social media tests you can run for your business, and we’ll discuss them next.
Types of Social Tests
Let’s say you want to know how copy affects an international audience on LinkedIn. Or, that you want evidence of a landing page performing better with a different image. Maybe you’re trying to identify if changing the tone of Instagram captions will lead to more audience engagement.
All of these scenarios are prime for social tests. They point out a problem that can be answered with data. This data would give insight about audiences interactions with brands on social media.
After identifying the goal, it’s time to pick the type of test. Let’s go through the different types and when you might use them.
A/B Test
A/B tests are likely the most common form of social testing. They look at a variable between two content types, measure the outlined goal, and provide results. So, consider running an A/B test if you want to test a single, small variable that may alter audience behavior.
For example, run an A/B test if you want to test out different CTA buttons on a Facebook ad or experiment with a post’s copy with/without emojis. The image below is an example of what an A/B test can look like.
Source:: HubSpot Blog
