The Best Marketers Are Mad Scientists
How to use experiments to grow your social media following
We are at a point in technology where thousands, if not millions of data points, are available. In this era, marketing has become a series of experiments. Successful marketers set targets, hypothesize strategies to meet them, and add incremental experimentation onto tried-and-true tactics. Then they measure the results, tweak the inputs, and repeat the process.
Just like in a lab experiment, measuring inputs and outcomes in marketing experiments is extremely important. Before launching a strategy to grow your social media following, follow these steps to set up your own experiments:
Establish a baseline
Create a snapshot of where are you are before making any changes. Here are some questions to ask:
How many followers do you have currently?
How often do your followers view, like, reply to, or share your content?
How long is it until the engagement typically peaks on your content (Hours? Days? Weeks?)
How much reach do your posts have beyond your existing followers?
How frequently do you post?
Set a Target:
Choose a metric to target for improvement within a specific time period (ex. Gain 200 new followers in 30 days.) Do a gut check to make sure the number is reasonable: One million followers divided across a year is more than 2,700 followers per day and 83,000 per month. Alternately, one new follower per day is 30 followers per month or 365 new followers in a year.
Follow the T4 Cycle (Try, track, tweak, and try again)
Example:
You decide to try Gary V’s $1.80 strategy to grow your Instagram following. Every day for a month you pick 10 hashtags that are relevant to your business and leave your “two cents” on the top nine trending posts in those hashtags. You notice that your account grows by 30 followers or roughly one new follower per day. The next month, you decide to scale the effort and, instead of leaving 90 comments per day, you ramp up to 180 comments per day (that’s $3.60 for those of you following along at home.) You notice that instead of 60 followers as predicted, you only get 10 more followers in a month for a total of 40 and, averaging two minutes per post, you’re spending six hours a day viewing and commenting on Instagram posts. In the following month, you decide to reclaim your time and limit yourself to 120 posts per day. You cut 60 posts, got back two hours of your day, and still gained 36 followers which is a number you can live with.
An important part of the experiment is measuring your progress. In the example, follower growth is tracked at the end of each month-long period. Unfortunately, most social platforms provide very limited profile metrics. Instagram’s built-in insights only cover seven days of activity, and most third-party social analytics platforms charge large monthly or annual fees for longer-term metrics. If you are just starting out and on a budget, it will be up to you to manually track your progress, and you may have to create a custom tracking solution. (Leave a comment if you want me to share a simple spreadsheet or chart you can use for this.)
It is not unusually difficult to build a social media following, but as the example illustrates, it can take a bit of time and energy. Growth in social media falls into categories that I think about as a three-legged stool. The stool won’t stand unless there is support in all three legs:
- Consistency in activity and engagement
- Quality and relevance of posted content
- Personal and meaningful engagement
Before starting a program to grow your social media following, create strategic experiments in different aspects of your social media strategy like changing the number of posts per day or week, using different hashtags and keywords, or using different media types. A/B testing may allow you to run more than one at a time, but for your sanity, and being able to clearly identify which things influenced the outcome, keep it simple and limit experiments to one or two factors at a time.
Now go, be great.
I am not endorsing Gary V or the $1.80 strategy ( I haven’t actually tried it, though a morbid sense of curiosity compels me.) If you are curious about whether it works and want to try it with me, leave a comment and let me know! For the upcoming video series on “Growing Your Social Media Following,” follow @krs_consulting on Instagram.
