Measuring & Testing Social Media Efforts

Let’s talk to you about measuring and testing your social media efforts. We’re going to walk you through a few reasons why you should test, how you should test, what you should test, and when to implement.

What do you really want to test? Well, we like to start with the easy things to implement, the proverbial "low hanging fruit."

Time of Day

If there are things that you can easily fix, such as the timing of your tweets, the timing of your blog posts, or the time of day, try that first. One of the best ways to do that is look at various tools for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn.

Engagement

The next thing that’s really easy to implement is what type of posts get the most engagement. This asks questions like: When you're on Facebook, which type of images works best? Is it just a link? Is it two images, or is it three images? We’ve actually found that using two images per post actually gets us more engagement than one image or three images.

On Twitter, there are various Twitter cards. There's the Twitter card that's the regular summary card, that has a small image, and then there's the large summary card. Ask yourself: What actually gets people to re-tweet? What gets them to re-share? These are the types of things that you want to look at and that you want to test.

Competition

The next thing we like to look at is what your competitors are doing. Take a look at the tool Rival IQ. They’ll show you what your competitors are doing in all the social spaces and you can measure yourself against them. You can say, "What are they doing? we're going to try that out now. We're going to see if that works for us." It's a good place to start and a good way to start testing.

Influencers

The other thing you’ll look at is figuring out exactly who your influencers are. It's one thing to say, "Influencers in the foodie blogging space are X, Y, and Z." What about in your particular space? Let's say that you are a restaurant in Seattle, and you're looking for foodies. You don't just want to look for people around the globe. You want to look for the people in your specific community. So we'll dig a bit deeper into that as well.

Running Tests

How do you actually run these tests? A lot of it is going to be manual. You create A/B tests on your landing pages. You test your emails. You test all these different things on your website. Think of social in the exact same way that you do that. You want to implement it by doing one step at a time. One thing that people often run into with social is that they try to make a bunch of changes at once, and then you don't what is working or what is actually not working.

So, when you're doing testing, take the same strategy that you take with your A/B test or with your email test, and do one thing at a time until you figure out if it's working or not. Then you can move on to the next thing. One of the things we like to say is just because you've tested it and you found that this one particular way works best, that doesn't mean that it always works best. Keep testing; don’t give up. When you get to a point, maybe you give yourself a month, maybe you give yourself three months. Then you say, "You know what? We’re going to try that again and see if we can actually make it even better the next time around."

Tracking Your Test

How we track tests here at Moz is good ol’ Google Docs. We keep a spreadsheet of data. Everyone on the Community Team knows what's going on, how they should be implementing their Facebook posts during this test. If every Facebook post is always going to be exactly two images, then everybody on the team needs to know that. Everybody on the team needs to track these tests.

Make sure that the whole team, whether it's your marketing team or product team, knows exactly what you're doing so that people don't come to you and say, "There were two really odd images on Facebook today." They'll automatically know, "Ah, that must be a test."

Weekly Measurements

We love the idea of measuring weekly. Every week you have a spreadsheet, where you record all the information. We specifically look at engagement and put those engagement numbers on a weekly basis.

Monthly Reporting

On a monthly basis, we actually send an email out to everyone at Moz, "this is exactly how we're doing. These are our engagement numbers." While we don't show the specific tests that we've run every single month, we do know, on our Internal Marketing Team, exactly what tests we've run and how they've made a mark over time.

Don’t just test things. We want you to re-test them. We want you to test, implement, and then re-test again. It's okay if something doesn't work. You just don't have to do it again. Try something new. Find out what works exactly for you, and make the best of your social efforts.