Social media is (and for the foreseeable future, will be) an integral part of marketing. Common sense says it’s a no brainer—investing in expanding your business’s ecosystem through social just makes sense because your customers, your prospective customers, and your competitors are on social media.
What do marketers need to measure in order to measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing? Some say measure conversions. Others say measure net promoter score, and there are those that say followers are the main metric to optimize. Others are just on the bandwagon, investing time and money in social media because they know it’s important but can’t say how effective it is. A 2014 study by Social Media Examiner reported that 87% of marketers surveyed don’t know how to measure their return on investment from social media.
What’s clear is that there is not a silver bullet solution to calculate return on investment from social media. This can cause skepticism. In such a data-driven era of marketing, managers, and CEOs want clarity and quantitative proof of the ROI of social media in order to make decisions.
Enter Experience Optimization
Experience optimization means proactively bringing data to the core of your business to create high performing user experiences that increase conversions, engagement, and revenue. Experimentation and testing are at the core of experience optimization. The goal is to apply these practices to social media strategy to quantify the value of social media and uncover helpful answers about where you should spend more or less time and resource.
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By asking specific questions about individual channels, you can reach conclusions about larger questions like:
- How much does social media impact my business?
- How does social media impact consumer spending and decision making?
- What are key drivers of success on social media?
- How much money and time should I be investing in social media?
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1. Test Location of Share Buttons
The physical location of a button is a factor in a visitor’s decision to share. Think about placement on the page as well as which pages have options to share.
These type of tests can help you determine where on the page people are most likely to click, as well as the places on your site that stir emotion—a main motivating factor in sharing. On article pages, test placing share buttons at the end of the article vs. the beginning vs. both places.
CNN
MASHABLE
SEPHORA
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Track which variations increase engagement on share buttons.
2. Experiment with the time you publish to different channels
Traffic generation is part of the value social media adds to your business. Test when you post to your various social channels to find peak times of the day and days of the week for click throughs.
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Measure which posts generate the most traffic.
3. Try different offers incentivizing people to share
A study found that recommendations—especially shared online—are more influential on a person’s buying decision than brand or price. Test the way you incentivize people to share or review your product or service.
When thinking of incentives, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. If you ask people to share or write a recommendation ask, “What’s in it for me?”
LYFT
WARBY PARKER
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Track which offers generate the most shares. You can offer different referral codes for incentives and measure which codes are used most.
4. Experiment with personalized calls to action on landing pages
Traffic coming from different channels to your website may not all be responsive to the same call to action. Test the ask you make of people based on which social channel they came from. This can help you learn about the actions that visitors from different social channels are most likely to take.
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Maybe traffic from LinkedIn is more likely to sign up for a service, traffic from Twitter might be more prone to share an article, and visitors from Facebook are inclined to like a page?
Test showing different call to actions on traffic from different referral sources.
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Track which call to action converts best for each segment of social traffic
5. Test calls to action in social updates
Language and length are two factors that go into crafting a call to action in a social post. Testing how you position an action is a way to gauge what your audience is interested in.
Direct appeals in social media updates may not lead to conversions. Your audience might engage more with informational posts.
TARGET
KISSMETRICS
SALESFORCE
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Run a controlled campaign for a few weeks on each of your main channels and track how usage of direct CTAs vs. absence of CTAs impacts engagement.
6. Test the design of your share buttons
Share buttons come in all shapes and sizes these days. Button designs that used to be omogenous across the web are becoming highly customized. Simply testing what your buttons look like can lead to a significant increase in shares.
Test a single share buttons versus multi-site share buttons.
FORBES
VEGGIETALES
MARKETO
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There are many questions to test on a share button:
- Do you include a share counter?
- Do you include who shared it?
Depending on what type of share it is, knowing who else shared it could be a very compelling
reason to buy or share. For e-commerce sites, seeing who bought an item could be more compelling than a star rating.
MEASURE SUCCESS
Which button design generates the most clicks. Also keep track of which channel is most popular.
If you see shares to one channel outshine the rest then you can focus more time and effort there.
7. Test one-click sign up with social media buttons
Reducing the steps and time necessary to login or signup to your service can increase engage-ment and usage. Any way to reduce friction can be positive for your company. Social login is one way do this. Try using social login on your website to see if it increases sign up rate or product usage.
GOODREADS
KISSMETRICS
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Apply insights from other tests to determine which social network your customers or users spend most time on and test offering that as a login method.
If you already have social login, test the size and position of the button relative to the form. Try
assuring people that you won’t post to their feed if they sign up.
MEASURE SUCCESS
Track sign up conversions or logins with and without the social login.
8. Experiment with the types of images you share
Using images in social posts has the power to significantly increase engagement. Twitter states that they see 2x engagement on posts with images. Test whether a specific type of image create more engagement over another.
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Instead of specific images, test out the impact of different image types, like images with people versus no people. Models versus just product. Test the impact different images have on different social networks. What drives shares and likes on Facebook may not perform as well on LinkedIn.
MEASURE SUCCESS
Come up with a way to categorize the types of images you post and track how the different image categories impact your key metrics.
9. Test how you position recommended content
Giving readers recommended articles to read next is a proven way to increase pageviews on your content. The exact design and positioning of the articles is something you can test.
Test adding social share numbers next to recommended articles. If the articles with the highest
number of shares are the most clicked in the recommended content module, then you have
proof on the return value of social media. Upworthy tested the design of the module they use to
recommend content and found a variation that increased social shares by 27%.
FORBES
TECHCRUNCH
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Track clicks on recommended articles with social proof support.
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Peter Koechley, co-founder of Upworthy, says.
“In the earliest days of Upworthy, our goal was to find people on social media and grab their attention and then get them to share back out to social media as well. We wanted to optimize that loop.”
As Upworthy’s audience grew, the team realized that the desired loop was not so tight. Engagement was growing and people were spending more time on the site–but it was difficult to find additional content after landing on a particular video or graphic. “Our users wanted to dig deeper, but there was no obvious way to get to a second piece of content,” says Peter. Peter’s goal was to increase sitewide engagement, while maintaining the share-optimized user experience.
Hypothesis
Peter believed that adding a recommended content module would decrease the number of social shares for each article on average. “We had already done a lot of testing and found that when we added distractions, user sharing went down,” Peter said. It’s the classic paradox of choice concept. The team decided to run a series of A/B tests to find a variation of a recommended content module that would maximize sharing and clicks on new content.
1st Round of Test Variations
The original article page had no recommended content links, so they started from scratch in terms of wireframes and design.
First, the team experimented with placement of the recommended content box on the page. Continue to the next page to see the variations they tested.
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2nd Round of Test Variations
Then they honed in on design trying a number of different aesthetics and wording for the recommended content. Was it “Watch these next”, “Some of our best”, or “Best of Upworthy” that attracted more clicks and shares?
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10. Experiment with targeting for paid social promotions
Paid updates can be a very effective way to reach new audiences, but which audiences perform best for your brand and what kind of promotion you do is something to experiment with. Test promoting updates to different audience segments.
When testing paid social placements the first step is deciding on your goal. Is your goal likes/follows on your company page or shares on a high value piece of content? Your goal will help you determine the type of advertising campaign to run. Then, it’s all about picking your audience.
TWITTER TWEETS
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MEASURE SUCCESS
Keep track of which audience segments turn into conversions.
So Where do I Start?
Start with the 10 experiments that can help you increase value from social media as noted above.
If one of them hasn’t jumped out at you to run immediately already, then start by defining a goal
you are trying to achieve with social media. How do you define goals? If nothing is jumping out
at you, then ask, why do we have [Insert popular social media site]? What will happen if we stop
posting there? Work backwards from there.
Do flex your creativity muscles. Continue to brainstorm brilliant, never-before-seen ways to
stand out through the cacophony of an average person’s social feed. And definitely do make it a
priority to measure the impact of your work on metrics that really matter for your business so
you can prove the value to your boss or boss’s boss.
Courtesy of the white paper titled, "A Guide To Creating Provable ROI From Social Media," written by Cara Harshman of Optimizely the world’s leading optimization platform, providing A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization for websites and mobile applications.
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