We don’t take generally-excepted best practices as the answer so we test a lot at SCUBE. There are few reasons of why we do this:
More than that, the biggest underlying reason is that in order to improve our clients’ businesses while taking into account all variables, we need to be on top of our game. We always ask ourselves the question: Is this working?
We approach social media in two phases:
In this article, I will cover how to use this medium and the different ways that you can test your social media engagement.
We start with a strategy. This will be based on several elements such as market research, competitive intelligence, best practices and a set of assumptions.
The strategy results in an editorial calendar, which is scheduled for a month ahead.
The editorial calendar has specific content categories, which we then test. Examples of content include industry specific news, humorous posts, inspirational quotes, questions to the audience, etc.
Once development of the strategy is complete, we implement it and start monitoring the results. We start by reviewing the metrics of content categories and individual posts. We usually look at the number of people reached and their engagement. This gives us validation on our assumptions and allows us to see exactly what’s working and what needs to be changed.
I’ll give an example of how we tested specific content assumptions for a client in the healthcare education industry. This client’s goal was to build a social media community and generate sales through social media channels.
We developed a strategy with initial content categories that we wanted to test:
Upon reviewing the results of the first three months of this client’s social media posts, we found that:
This test allowed us to understand the content that engages this audience and we therefore changed our course of action to focus on content that was more likely to elicit social participation and sharing.
Another angle to take when testing your social media strategy is to test the ways that the content is shared.
To explain this concept, I will use as an example the same client mentioned above.
One of the assumptions we had was that fans do not like reading long posts and are mostly skim the social channels. The shorter the captions, the quicker the intended audience can read it, engage upon it and move forward. Here are the test results:
Example 1:
On Facebook, a funny post with the caption of "Stay strong!"
A funny post with the caption "Very true. If you don't have a sense of humor...you will never survive this line of work!"
Example 2:
An inspirational quote with the caption "Nurses deserve respect :-)"
An inspiration quote with the caption "We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives." - John F. Kennedy"
Looking at the results from multiple posts, we concluded that shorter image captions reach more viewers and engagement.
What have we learned from reviewing this client’s Facebook engagement results?
