Step-by-step Guide to Your Own Social Media Experiments
Social media promotes innovation and creativity. Experiments have been around for some time – because they help businesses improve their strategy, sales and success. Technology has truly allowed marketers to experiment with their practises and discover what’s working best. One popular form of testing is social media experiments.
Social media is constantly changing – trends come and go, popular strategies vary, and marketing methods transform.
Think of Facebook, for example, it’s come a long way from being an online community for Harvard students to an influential social network with 2.23 billion monthly users.
To grow on social media networks like Facebook, businesses need to alter and test their strategies and keep connected with consumers who value their brand.
In this article, we’ll be exploring how you can run a social media experiment to transform your social media strategy.
1. Goal Setting
Every strategy starts with setting goals, and unsurprisingly running social media experiments is no different.
Here are typical social media goals:
- – More followers
- – Increased reach / impressions
- – Greater engagement (like, shares, comments)
- – Lead generation
- – Website traffic
- – Boosting return on investment (ROI)
- – Brand awareness
You can have more than one goal. For example, perhaps you focus on raising your followers and engagement with the long-term goal to build leads and increase ROI.
Each style of post can have its own smaller goal. For example, a paid ad might be purposed to raise website traffic. Whereas, a post about entering a competition may be purposed to increase engagement.
2. Initial Ideas
So, you’ve got a goal – but now you need to decide the different ways in which you can reach it.
Here’s a couple of examples:
If your goal is to generate more followers … then how are you going to do that? What are you going to experiment with? The style of your posts (images, text video)? The content (articles, blogs, short and long)?
If you’re looking to discover what form of content generates more engagement, then consider producing imagery, text and video.
3. Considerations
Before running your experiment, you need to realistically think about how it’s going to play out.
Could the experiment negatively impact your business? For example, will a sudden change in content style cause an influx of un-followers?
Are you almost certain the experiment will work in your benefit? How likely is it you’ll achieve the results you hoped for?
4. Begin Testing
Now you’re ready to start your social media experiment!
If you can, test one thing to begin with and see how it goes. If you don’t achieve the results you expected, then perhaps go back to the drawing board and brainstorm more ideas. When you’re fully confident, then you can run multiple experiments.
5. Review and Analyse
- Are your results as expected?
- What contributed to your success / failure?
- What did you learn?
- What could you do differently for next time?
- Did you achieve your goal?
Delivering a successful social media experiment can be a challenge, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the process.
Re-evaluate, consider new ideas and test!
Why not check out our Digital Marketing Terms Glossary?
About the author:
Marie Harwood is a Digital Marketing Assistant at Different Gravy Digital, Hale, Cheshire.
Different Gravy Digital are a full service Digital Marketing Agency operating in the Hospitality & Leisure, Financial Services, Legal & Property sectors. Products and services range from; 3D & 360° Tours, Website Design & Build, Social Media, Video Production, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Content Creation, Email Marketing, Online Feedback / Review Systems and Paid Advertising (Google, Bing and Social Media).
Contact Details:
marie@differentgravydigital.co.uk
0161 706 000
120a Ashley Road, Hale, Altrincham, Cheshire, WA14 2UN