Bubora Academy
A/B Testing on Social Media
Real-time A/B testing enables you to optimize your content marketing and advertising tactics as needed.
Direct mail marketers have long utilized A/B testing to do minor tests on a small proportion of their contact lists prior to sending out their whole campaigns.It was time-consuming, since they had to have their testing running well in advance of a campaign launch.
Fortunately, contemporary marketers can use A/B testing in real time, enabling them to fine-tune their content marketing and advertising strategies in real time, to effectively use their social media investments and the time of their content team.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is an excellent way to conduct real-world research.
To execute A/B testing, you segregate your audience into two random groups and present them with various variations. Then, you use the measurements you've set to see which variant works best.
With conventional split testing, you should only test one version at a time. To test a variety of headlines, pictures, and article and ad formats, you will need to run many tests.
Testing several alternatives doesn't guarantee you'll find the variable responsible for the outcome. You might make inaccurate assumptions about how various aspects of your content or advertisement interact to influence reaction.
How can A/B testing help your social media strategy?
In the beginning, when you first began doing social media marketing, you had to make assumptions in order to build your plan. Another way to put it: As an example, you may have seen that tweets containing photographs receive 35% more retweets. However, does this strategy hold true for your brand, and your audience?
As a result, using social media for A/B testing lets you discover, for example, how a tweet with a video does when it is compared to a tweet with a picture for your particular followers. Next, if the tweet with the video outperforms, you may do experiments on the video itself, testing different types of videos, such as short vs lengthy, with sound against silent, animated against live action, and so on.
Because you are leveraging all the aspects of your social strategy, this same reasoning applies to your whole social strategy. When you're evaluating social media marketing plans, you should utilize A/B testing to determine which details have the most impact. In particular, you should utilize A/B testing to find out which elements have the greatest impact.
You may use this method across all social networks, and test various versions of your company's marketing messages on each particular site to prevent you from accidentally making the assumption that what works well for your company on Twitter would also work well on LinkedIn.
With time, you will receive insights into what is the ideal social media approach for you on each network, which will assist you in further refining your plan. However, it is vital that you continue to experiment with little adjustments even when you believe you have a great recipe. To know the market better, you have to continually test your assumptions. This enables you to remain on top of changes in the preferences of your audience, so you will not be surprised by how quickly new trends emerge.
While running A/B tests for your organic content can provide valuable insights about what performs best, you should be sure to use this information to make informed decisions about which content is worth paying to promote and which content elements should be included in your social media advertisements.
What can you A/B test?
One of the best things about social media A/B testing is that you can test any aspect of your social media posts and advertising. Let's take a look at some of the most frequent components to A/B test.
Post text
Extensive testing is definitely warranted, especially since the kind and style of language you use in your social media post is so crucial. Let's look at some possible tests, for example:
1. Post/content length. (number of characters). For example, an emoji may be used instead of a literal text equivalent (such as a quotation or inquiry vs a statement).
2.The use of a digit to label posts that are linked to a numbered list.
3.The use of punctuation.
3The way you talk is characterized by a casual vs formal tone, as well as a passive vs dynamic style.
Headline and description in link preview
In addition to all the headlines and descriptions in the linked article, the headline and description included in the article preview are quite noticeable and very critical to test. To expand on that, you can use all of the same checks and criteria for post headlines to your article titles. Make sure to keep in mind that you may alter the title in the link preview, therefore the title on your website does not have to be the same as the one in the link preview.
Content may be searched using a variety of keywords and by link keywords and by image keywords, and by in-text keywords. A digit can be the key.
Call to action
The call to action (CTA) is one of the most crucial parts of your marketing—where it's you urge your readers to take action. Making this correct is crucial, so make sure to employ social media A/B testing to do many small tests across numerous variations, seeking to establish the very smallest differences.
Use of image or video
For our investigation, it seems as if postings containing photos and videos perform better overall, but we need to ensure that this holds true with our audience, as well as on all of the social networks. Let's look at some possible tests, for example:
1. Text only versus posts with an image or video
2. A static picture versus an animated GIF
3. Pictures of people or objects as opposed to data visualizations such as graphs or infographics
4. Length of the video
Ad format
One of the advantages of employing social media advertisements is that you may try multiple formats to find the one that works best for your content. A good example of this may be in your Facebook advertising. It could be more effective to utilize carousel advertisements to advertise product updates, while a local ad with a “Get Directions” button works better when you're opening a new shop.
Combining the results of A/B testing Facebook ad formats against one another can help you select which to utilize for each sort of campaign.
Hashtags
Though hashtags help your social media reach, are they ultimately harmful to your online audience or engaging for your fans? You may experiment with social media A/B testing to find out. Don't merely assess the effectiveness of a hashtag vs not using one.
Target audience
This ad is unique, since rather than presenting multiple variants of your post or ad to comparable groups, you display the same ad to multiple audiences to determine which one receives a higher reaction.
An example of a possible implementation of retargeting advertisements may be A/B testing of Facebook advertisements; you may find out that certain target groups react favorably to retargeting advertisements, while others find them unsettling. In order to know for sure how your specific audience segments will react, it is necessary to do experiments like these.
Your targeting choices may vary depending on the social network you use, but you can typically segment based on gender, language, device, platform, and even unique user traits like hobbies and online activities.
By analyzing your data, you will be able to devise specific marketing and a plan for each group.
Profile elements
The many processes and aspects are rather different here, since rather of producing two separate iterations and sending them out to different groups, you are developing and refining one process and iterating it for increased effectiveness. Instead, it is better to monitor your social media profile on a specific network every week to determine the average number of new followers you get each week. If you want to track your follower rate, you should try altering anything, such your profile picture or bio, and see how the new follower count changes.
You should also try to publish the same kind of material, and publish the same amount of posts over the weeks you're testing in order to minimize the effect of your posts, and increase the effects of the profile modification you're testing.
Website content
Using social media A/B testing, you may determine whether or not you want to include a certain content strategy on your website.
One specific way in which A/B testing social media images may provide an understanding of what is best for a value proposition is by showing what works well. You now have that information, so you can use it to determine which picture best suits the landing page for your current campaign. However, don't stop testing; continue testing to make sure the image works well in the whole website context as it did on the social network you used for testing.
How to run an A/B test on social media
Though the core procedure of A/B testing has stayed almost unchanged for decades, two major changes have occurred: one is the addition of several iterations of the test, and the other is the emergence of a new kind of test subject, referred to as a "tester."
The fantastic news is that social media has reduced the amount of time it takes to perform tests while simultaneously improving efficiency. This means you can perform tests on the move, not only wait for findings to come in via mail.
Remember: The aim is to conduct one variation vs another, and then compare the answers to decide which variation is the better one.
An A/B test on social media, such as a Facebook campaign, often consists of the following four phases:
Choose one element to experiment with.
- Use information available from prior studies to determine what would be most effective.
- Do not hesitate to dispute assumptions, though.
- The resulting two versions should reflect the findings of your study (or your intuition), and it is important to have just one aspect that changes between the versions.
- Select a few of your followers and show each variant to them.
- Make sure you know your outcomes, and keep a record of them.
- Choose the version that will allow you to succeed.
-If you win a version that produces excellent results, then share it with your complete list so that everyone may benefit.You may even test it against another smaller variation to see if you can enhance the results more.
-In order to establish a library of best practices for your brand, make it your business' mission to share what you learn with your whole company.
- Start all processes from the beginning.