Summary: Throughout I will be explaining how A/B split testing is implemented on social media, its importance, and its role in increasing conversation.
Social Media Marketers Are Scientists!
It’s true social media marketers are constantly running different experiments to find the best way of converting consumers into customers and one of the most productive ways of doing this is by performing A/B split testing.
A/B Split Testing; What It Is And How It Works
Split testing is an experimental process that trials different variations against each other in order to find out what will make your audience react the way you want them to. In regards to social media, the winning combination will display:
The right image with the best copy, aimed at a specific target audience, at the perfect time.
It’s this combination that will prompt your audience to click, purchase and visit your webpage more than they did before.
In order to find that winning combination the idea is to keep one variable consistent while changing others. For example; to find the image that is most engaging for your consumers you would continually change this aspect of your campaign while keeping the copy and layout the same. Here is one example:
After discovering the image that generates the most conversation, the next step is to test varying copy while consistently using the most successful image throughout.
Once gaining an understanding of the visual combination that best appeals to consumers, it’s important to discover what target audiences are most responsive to the overall campaign. Then with that data you can test which day of the week and at what times your target audience best engage in conversation.
This is something worth experimenting with when posting daily quotes, as there might be a larger response when posting on #MotivationMonday:
As opposed to posting on #WisdomWednesday:
The Importance And Advantages Of Split Testing
• A/B split testing is an important, straightforward process that allows you to validate business ideas before fully deploying them, ultimately saving a company from making expensive, and difficult to change, technical investments.
• It allows you to determine your most profitable market and the best way of engaging them in conversation.
• Defining what elements within you campaign your target markets respond to most positively, providing an insight as to what will work best in the future, saving marketers both time and money.
• It is useful in low-data rate test, if your landing page has only a few conversations per day; it’s an advanced tuning method.
• Ease of test design variations could create new and unexpected vision paths.
• Ease of analysis means you only have to compare the baseline version of each challenger to see if you’ve reached your desired statistical confidence level.
Remember
With new markets occurring all the time A/B testing becomes a never-ending experiment as it is a marketer’s job to continually improve and look for the best way of communicating the brand message and encourage conversation.
Links:
http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/how-to-implement-ab-testing-on-social-media/
http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/article/advantages-and-disadvantages-ab-split-testing-landing-pages/1
https://www.optimizely.com/resources/multivariate-test-vs-ab-test
amygovan 