Drive Social Media Engagement With This Simple System of Data Analysis

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In today’s digital marketing landscape there is an abundance of data. It may, in fact, seem like an overabundance that makes it difficult to ascertain what’s actually important. A simple system for more efficient and effective data-based marketing is by grouping social media posts by certain variables. Doing so allows you to distinguish between certain traits that increase engagement. For example, you can compare photos vs videos, long captions vs short captions, etc. See what’s working best and lean into it. Sounds simple enough, right? Here’s how to go about it…

Examples of Grouping Posts

Here are some of the many different ways in which you can group your social posts:

1) Campaign: categorizing all posts by a broader category compared to another one (e.g., if you’re running a sale, or promoting a certain line of product/service)

2) Content Theme: categorizing all posts by theme (e.g., promotional posts, behind the scenes, informational, etc.)

2) Content Type: categorizing posts by video, photo, carousel, Reel, IGTV, or on Twitter/Facebook by text only, photo, video, etc.

3) Posting Frequency/Time of Day: categorizing posts by your posting frequency and/or time of day. For example, what happens when you post 2 times per day vs 4 times per day — don’t just look at your overall engagement. Look at engagement per post. What happens you post at night vs in the morning?

4) Platform: categorizing posts by platform. For example, is Instagram outperforming Twitter? Is TikTok outperforming Instagram?

5) Type of Caption: categorizing posts by the caption. How do short captions perform compared to longer captions? How about emoji-only?

How To Get Started

If you use a social media scheduler, many of them allow you to tag each post as you schedule them out to allow for analysis by grouped variables (i.e., tag all posts related to a sale as “Sale” and late analyze all Sale posts and compare them to the last sale you ran). If you don’t use a social media scheduler, you can start simple by using one grouping method and doing a few A/B tests.

Grouping content makes it easy to test variables and hypotheses, an essential part of any marketing strategy.

Turning Data into Action

Ok, so you’ve been testing and you have these different sets of data; how do you turn them into action?

1) Lean into what’s working: If photo posts are performing better than video, post more photos. If something clearly isn’t working, swap it out for better performing content. That being said, I highly recommend continuing to experiment; even if something isn’t working, try a new variation of it. For example, try a 15 second video vs a 45 second video. Continue to experiment and learn.

2) Improve insights with paid ads: By running paid social ads you can derive even more insights. For example, you can see if a specific type of content performs better with a certain demographic. An easy way to do this is just to boost your posts for a small amount to get that extra layer of data.

Most importantly, keeping asking “why.” For example, maybe you see that photos are performing better than videos. Ask why. Does it have to do with the type of photo/video? Does it have to do with time of posting? Caption? By asking why certain posts may be performing better than others, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience.

Finding Sufficient Data

Unless you’re running the socials of a major brand and have hundreds or thousands of pieces of social content to analyze, you probably don’t have sufficient data to say with 100% confidence that something does or does not work. They key here is to continue to learn and increase your confidence. I especially want to emphasize that one or two tests are not enough. There are too many variables that go into a successful social post to be able to claim causation with 100% confidence after two posts. The key is simply to continuously increase your confidence in what works best for your audience. Using this grouping system, even at a basic level, will make your digital marketing more efficient and effective. Get creative, experiment, and learn.

Originally published at https://joshdviner.com on April 20, 2021.