5 Ways To Test, 7 Ways To Track Social Media Marketing
If you’ve followed our series for A Simple Process for Successful Social Media, by now you’ve created a strategy based on listening & identifying the problem. The fourth phase involves Testing & Tracking the solution so it’s…
Quiz Time!
What’s the answer? I don’t know and that’s the point. I can trust my intuition & my instincts as a marketer – all of which are good & fine – to pick the title of the post but that's marketing myopia. Why not ask you? As smart as we are, we become smarter when we involve others in the solution. And, as marketers, historically we have never had more opportunities to increase the odds of success by pre-testing our work. So whether it’s as simple as a title for a post or an email or as large as a service or product solution, trial or test a number of ways to solve the problem before rolling it out to the community at large.
Testing
Here are few ways to do it:
- Stumble Upon: a great way to get an instantaneous reaction to content
- Pay-per-click: a god – or at least –Google-given way to get a quick read on specific post titles or email subject lines
- A/B Testing: We’re all familiar with it with Website Optimizer but services like Objective Marketer allow you to test different versions of your social media content with smaller samples of your community.
- History: Don’t forget to look back and study the results and the learning from the results of similar content
- Hallway Test: When all else fails, get out of your cubicle and ask others who fit the target customer profile. It’s a great way to learn not only what works, but also why.
Tracking
Now that you’ve got your answer set-up your tracking to find out if you’re right. Some may ask ‘why now?’. Can’t I do this later after I get my program launched? The answer is: benchmarks. Somewhere down the road you’re going to be asked to prove this is working and you’ll rue the day you forgot to set base levels before you began.
The answer is g) all of above. At the SMX/eMetrics conference in Toronto last week (of which we were one of the sponsors) Stephane Hamel from Universite Laval said that the last time he checked the scientific method required multiple points of observation before making a conclusion. He’s right because accounting isn’t going to care how many followers you have, however, if you can demonstrate a causal relationship between a spike in retweets and one in lead form submission, then you’ve got a result that will carry weight.
So be like my new favourite TV show hero: 
Look for patterns. Work like hell. And if you lose, as a saying we have around here goes, don’t lose the lesson.
Bob Nunn is Internet Marketing Consultant in Toronto and the founder of BrandMechanics. Bob has a successful track record of helping companies fine-tune their online marketing and getting their brands revved up. He has won over 40 marketing awards for his work in advertising, new media, email and more for clients such as Yellow Pages Group ‘The Find Engine’, Blockbuster ‘Guaranteed To Be There’, FutureShop ‘You’ll like what the future has in store.’ and 3M ‘Innovation’ amongst others.
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I agree about the part with Stumble Upon, it is a very great tool
Yeah!
excellent sharing,
I already used stumbleupon toolbar. I always share my ideas with my community. It's very useful to expand knowledge base.
Great Stuff Bob.
Just like what Carl said, I agree about StumbleUpon. It is a great tool and I am using it almost everyday.
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