Experiment ideas social media optimizely

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Share This A Guide To Creating Provable ROI in Social Media

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A Guide to Creating Provable ROI in Social Media - an Optimizely publication

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The Value Question: What is Social Media Worth?

“Social media is great for building trust and getting attention from your target audience. Once you have their attention and trust, it’s time to move them away from the social media platform and over to your website where you can call the shots and design an awesome conversion experience.”

Michael Aagaard

Conversion Optimization Expert

If you have ever tweeted from your company’s Twitter handle, or posted an update to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ page, you are probably sick and tired of thinking about this question, “what is the return on investment from that post?”

With words like data-driven, metrics, ROI, measurement, it’s clear that there is a lot of impetus to attribute revenue and conversions directly to all marketing functions—not just social media.

Measuring many other marketing activities is more established and straightforward. For example, if you ask, “How much return did we get for our investment in a paid search marketing campaign?” you can run a report on ad spend and quickly calculate costs-per specific activities important to you.

If email marketing comes under question, you can list off a number of ways to quantify its value. You can correlate email open/click activity with revenue or engagement, or compare the value of a customer who is included in an email campaign versus one who isn’t.

When the question comes to social media, the answer—as you are aware—tends to get fuzzy.

Of course there are times when updates to social media channels lead directly to conversions but there are also times—perhaps many times—when social media updates lead to less monetizable events. What’s the value of a like on LinkedIn? A retweet on Twitter? A share on Facebook?

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What we do know is that 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.

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.

This guide will walk you through one of the practices you can do as a social media manager or marketer to collect more quantitative feedback on your investment in social media, increase how often your content gets shared, and how often visitors from social media turn into customers for your business. This practice is optimization.

No business is saying, “Oh, no I won’t get on [insert popular social network here] because that wouldn’t help achieve my business goals.”

What they are saying is what impact does Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest have for me and how do I prove it? Opinions are mixed on this question.

In August 2013, The CMO Survey reported that 66% of respondents said their companies are putting more pressure on measuring social ROI.

The problem: the majority of marketers do not know how.

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Enter Experience OptimizationExperience 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.

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?

MARKETING STRATEGY

OPTIMIZATIONEXPERIENCE

is an

ESSENTIAL PARTof any

RUNTESTS

HYPOTHESIZE IMPROVEMENTS

DETERMINEOPTIMIZATIONPOINTS

DEFINE GOALS

CREATEVARIATIONS

MEASURERESULTS

The experience optimization loop helps break the looming question, “what is the value of social media?” into smaller, more measurable parts.

• Which social channel does my audience spend the most time on?

• What kind of content are they most compelled to share?

• What time of day are they most likely to interact on different channels?

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10 ExperimentsThat Can Help You

Increase Value From Social Media

Here are 10 different experiment ideas and

the questions they’ll help you answer about

your social media investment.

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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.

MEASURE SUCCESS Track which variations increase engagement on share buttons.

CNN uses a sticky share bar that scrolls with you down the page.

Sephora has share buttons on the product pages. Are people more likely to share something after they’ve decided to buy it or during decision making?

Mashable has a share header and only shows Facebook and Twitter with an option to expand.

01 Test location of share buttons

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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.

There is no consensus in the world of social media about the time of day or day of the week a post will reach maximum exposure. Your audience is unique compared to another brand so you should test it.

Dan Zarella, social media scientist of Hubspot, did a study that found afternoon Tweets had higher click-through-rates. Another study by Dan Zarella found that the best time to Tweet for retweets is at 5pm.

Many social media measurement softwares like Sprout Social and Buffer will track timing for you. If you don’t use one, then you can use unique URLs based on the time of day. Track which unique URL generated the most traffic in your site analytics.

MEASURE SUCCESS Measure which posts generate the most traffic.

02 Experiment with the time you publishto different channels

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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?”

Tip: Try pre-populating a form with share text. People may need a nudge or inspiration to decide what to write.

MEASURE SUCCESS Track which offers generate the most shares. You can offer different referral codes for incentives and measure which codes are used most.

In email, Lyft offers a credit for referring friends to sign up on different social networks.

Warby Parker strongly urges sharing on its order confirmation pages.

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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.

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.

has found that it’s best to show different share

buttons on articles based on the type of content and how the

visitor reached the site. This is a great test to run if a large

percentage of your traffic comes from social.

LIKE OUR PAGE

SHARE AN ARTICLE

MAKE A PURCHASE

SUBSCRIBE FOR UPDATES

SIGN UP FOR A SERVICE

MEASURE SUCCESS Track which call to action converts best for each segment of social traffic

CALL TO ACTION

YOUR LANDING PAGE

04 Experiment with personalized calls to action on landing pages

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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.

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.

On Facebook, Target doesn’t directly tell people to buy the product, but uses other promotional language to engage people to click the link.

On LinkedIn, Salesforce.com shares information without a direct appeal to click or read the article.

KISSmetrics tells people directly to “learn more”. The arrows to the link add emphasis on the link.

05 Test calls to action in social updates

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Share buttons come in all shapes and sizes these days. Button designs that used to be homogenous

across the web are becoming highly customized. Simply testing what your buttons look like can lead

to a significant increase in shares.

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.

Test a single share buttons versus multi-site share buttons.

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.

Forbes has a sticky share icon that expands when you hover over it.

Veggietales found that adding counters to the share buttons on their homepage increased revenue per visitor by 36.8%.

On their blog, Marketo shows aggregate shares with a heart symbol.

06 Test the design of your share buttons

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Reducing the steps and time necessary to login or signup to your service can increase engagement 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.

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.

Since a Google account is required to use the product, KISSmetrics uses Google sign in.

Goodreads offers many different social logins in addition to a signup form.

Test one-click sign up with social media buttons

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YOUR LANDING PAGEYOUR LANDING PAGE This Product is Fast!

This Product is Fast!

GET IT NOW!GET IT NOW!

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.

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.

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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.

Experiment with the types of images you share

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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.

TechCrunch has thumbnails at the end of articles recommending content.

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%.

MEASURE SUCCESS Track clicks on recommended articles with social proof support.

Forbes recommends content receiving high page views or trending on social networks on its top navigation.

Test how you position recommended content

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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.

Recommended Content Meets Social Sharing: An Example From Upworthy

“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,” says Peter Koechley, co-founder of Upworthy.

“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

We’re maybe as good as a coin-flip at guessing what’s going to work best for our users. We rely on testing to just make better decisions. People are really fascinating and interesting…and weird! It’s really hard to guess their behaviors accurately.

Peter KoechleyCo-founder, Upworthy

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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?

They tested recommended content above the article.

They tested different color treatments.

They tried it to the left of the article.

WINNER

The box to the right of the article titled “Best of Upworthy” increased social shares on recommended content by 28%! We want people on our site to really enjoy a piece of

content and share it in huge numbers. Part of this is about curation great content, but it’s also about taking time to optimize every part of the experience for maximum shareability and satisfaction.

Peter KoechleyCo-founder, Upworthy

Click to view the full story of Upworthy’s tests.

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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.

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Tip: Make sure your audience experimentation is controlled. Change one filter at a time to see if/how that difference in audience impacts success of your campaign.

Tip: Beyond targeting, test different ad variations (images and ad text) as well. On social platforms, click through rate can be heavily influenced by images. Test different/contrasting colors, people vs. products, male vs. female image.

MEASURE SUCCESS Keep track of which audience segments turn into conversions.

This is what audience selection looks like on LinkedIn. You can see how wide your net is as you add more specific filters.

Here’s an example of a promoted Tweet from Lincoln Motor Company that is targeted to people searching for “Audi”.

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So Where do I Start?

Start with one of these ideas we covered:

01. Test location of share buttons

02. Experiment with the time you publish to different channels

03. Try different offers incentivizing people to share

04. Experiment with personalized calls to action on landing pages

05. Test calls to action in social updates

06. Experiment with the design of your share buttons

07. Test one-click sign up with social media buttons

08. Experiment on the types of images you share

09. Test how you position recommend content

10. Experiment with targeting for paid social promotions

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.

Then start testing!

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About this Guide10 Experiment Ideas to Help Increase Value from Social Media

More Resources

Written by:

Cara HarshmanContent Marketing Specialist@CaraHarshman

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