5. Try crafting platform-specific content experiments

[shaownhasan]

The best way to truly know what makes an impact in you content strategy and what leads to the strongest ROI is to experiment.

Use this article as a guide and design a social media experiment to test different content types, designs and formats in your strategy.

The key is having controls—like how we controlled our posting time, frequency and themes to limit the number of variables we were testing at once. And, to know how you’re going to measure your posts ahead of time.

Having the right LinkedIn tools is crucial to running effective tests. amazon data As Greg put it, “When I used to be a social team of one, I ran social media experiments like this and had to lean on spreadsheets that lend to human error. So doing an experiment in a product like Sprout makes it much easier to look back on results, understand trends, dive deeper into posts and keep a controlled experiment.” The easier it is for you to compile your findings and analyze your results, the more motivated you’ll be to test.

A screenshot of Sprout's post performance report where posts are ranked in terms of engagement to identify your top-performing posts in a given time period.
Just ensure your test posts feel natural to your strategy. “Doing a social media experiment needs to feel authentic and natural for your audience and platform,” Greg explains.

For example, this is a regular, non-experimental post on our LinkedIn channel. Compare this to the experiment posts we shared above:

A non-experimental LinkedIn post on Sprout's channel that highlights what our typical posts look like, and how they're similar to our experiment posts. This one starts with a line that reads, "could you be overlooking a major opportunity? here are 4 social stats you need to know" and then lists four social stats. The post includes a data visual about how consumers find the perfect product.