If you're using social media for business, you need to test and measure it. But as we've said before just because it's hard to place a solid ROI figure on social media, doesn't mean you can't measure the effectiveness of social media.
Don't test and measure just for the sake of having cool looking metrics and graphs. Instead, measure your social actions to learn what works, what doesn't and how to improve.
To get genuine traction on social media, you have to balance consistency and context.
Before you post, consider what do you want your content/post to achieve and how you want people to engage with your posts? Most of your goals will centre on engagement (like, comment, click the link or shares).
The tactics that get more clicks and shares are the posts that inspire, engage, educate or amaze. Check out our tips to measure the effectiveness of your social media below.
For important sales posts, test the same post in different ways. For example, use the same copy with two different images (one with objects Vs. one with people), or use the same image with different copy, or mix of both.
Schedule the posts on the same day of the week and the same time a couple of weeks apart in order to get a true reading and monitor what people engage with.
If your posts link back to your website, you'll want to be able to tell them apart in your analytics report. In Google Analytics you can use URL builder to identify the URLs that are most effective in attracting users to your content.
Is your audience engaging with your content? Are they clicking the links and following your call-to-actions? Test different calls-to-action to see what catches your audience's attention.
And then, once you've convinced your audience to click through, test different landing pages to see what happens once followers land on your site.