Planning and scheduling content for your various social media platforms can be one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing.
Will it get high engagement? Will it reach enough people? How many emoji's should I add in the copy to get the most likes?
There's only one way to find out and that's to test and test again until you find the magic formula. But come one, who has time to do that when they're running a business?
That's where this week's guest comes in…Scott Ayres is the guy who literally tests everything for you. If you want to know how many tweets are too many tweets then Scott has the answer!
Let's dig in and find out the best and most efficient ways to test, test, test…
- It all starts with a lot of brainstorming. We literally have a Google spreadsheet that has hundreds of ideas in it.
- Every time someone comes up with an idea or it gets raised in support it gets added to the sheet.
- From there we have to decide whether or not we can actually test something. Is it testable and is it something people will be interested in?
A lot of people want to test things based on feelings, for example why one company gets more engagement than another. That’s the kind of thing that you just aren’t going to get any data for. So that kind of thing is not worth testing.
The sort of things that I like to focus my testing on are:
- What happens when you do a certain thing?
- How can I get more reach?
- How can I get more impressions?
- How can I get more engagement?
The problem most small businesses have is that they don’t give their tests enough time. We give our tests at least 20 days but really you want to give it 6-8 weeks.
- It depends on the platform first of all.
- We try to have at least 2 different accounts on each social platform we are testing on so that we can get an average of the results. This is because we might have one account that’s doing better because it’s more popular, or has more content on it etc.
- We’ll usually test Instagram 1-2 times per day. On Facebook, we test 1 time per day. With Twitter, we sometimes push it to 15 posts per day!
- Obviously, I use Agorapulse for a lot of our scheduling. I have also used Hootsuite and Buffer in the past for scheduling.
- I’m using a site at the moment called Quintly, they do a lot of really cool deep analytics!
- I use a cool tool that helps me pull in tweets and look at engagement and data in a different way, called Socialert.
- I also use TweetChat to keep up with my Twitter chats.
- And even though all of these tools are really good I still like to go back to the raw data from each individual platform, just in case there is something more accurate in there.
- Because the platforms change so often it’s hard to say really, but for us, we like to re-test 4 times per year (once per quarter).
- For individual businesses, I would advise looking at your data and changing your strategy every 1-2 months to keep up with the changes and the trends. You can re-evaluate your plans and strategies depending on your results and the latest updates/research.
Yep, that's a lot to think about lads…
A book that you would recommend…
Trust Agents by Chris Brogan.
What is your top success habit?
I use an app called Todoist to keep up with everything I should be doing through the day.
Who do you look up to?
There’s a guy named Ian Anderson Gray and I love everything he’s putting out content wise.
*Bonus – we have Ian Anderson Gray on the podcast too!*
How do you define success?
Just being happy.
Here the big one…who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
I’m going to have to say, Rob because he stood up through this whole podcast!
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
You can find out more at agorapulse.com/socialmedialab and you can see what we’re up to and sign up for a free trial too!
Leave a Comment