Social Media Roundup: The Importance of A/B Testing

Would you like to learn how to improve user experiences and more effectively reach your association’s website goals? Not interested in reading more? How about this: Achieve epic optimization results from A/B testing! Interested now? We’re trying all sorts of tactics to get you in the spirit of A/B testing in today’s Social Media Roundup.

The Benefits of A/B Testing

More and more publishers are turning to A/B headline testing to boost traffic. @lmoses  (opens in a new tab) has more: http://t.co/dKlibAdiPs  (opens in a new tab)

— NewsWhip (@NewsWhip) October 22, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Digiday reporter Lucia Moses dove into the world of optimization recently,  (opens in a new tab) examining extensive A/B testing efforts by Business Insider, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed. These publishers are reaping the benefits of testing, including optimizing content recommendations and calls-to-action and gauging reader reaction to automation versus human curation.

For example, BuzzFeed wanted to make the most of its readership coming from Pinterest, which (as we’ve reported before) is becoming a huge source of social traffic. So Buzzfeed reduced the number of share buttons readers see to encourage them to pin content on Pinterest. While Facebook and Twitter shares decreased, “pinning overwhelmingly increased,” Buzzfeed Publisher Dao Nguyen told Moses.

“That was a relatively dramatic change, at least for BuzzFeed, but A/B testing can show how even seemingly small alterations can have a big impact on audience behavior,” Moses writes. “When BuzzFeed updated its share buttons with a flatter color, sharing rose 20 percent, Nguyen said.”

Effective A/B testing takes time to build and track, but it can benefit your association immensely. And why limit testing to the digital space? You can apply the same principles to your personal pitches, association events, and workshops. You never know if there’s a better way of doing things if you don’t experiment. (ht @NewsWhip  (opens in a new tab))

Association Storytelling

@jasonrleduc  (opens in a new tab) Also, check out 10/21 #assnchat  (opens in a new tab) on storytelling: http://t.co/L0vpmuCZWv  (opens in a new tab) @KaitlinSolomon3 #commchat  (opens in a new tab)

— Aldo Maragoni (@maragoni) October 22, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Miss yesterday’s #assnchat  (opens in a new tab) discussion on Twitter? Don’t worry: As nonprofit organization manager Aldo Maragoni reports, Kait Solomon  (opens in a new tab) has collected the best parts of yesterday’s discussion on Storify  (opens in a new tab). Focused on harnessing and building the power of storytelling, yesterday’s chat featured input from host KiKi L’Italien  (opens in a new tab), membership marketing pro Amanda Kaiser  (opens in a new tab), and our own Ernie Smith  (opens in a new tab), among many others. Check out yesterday’s #assnchat right here  (opens in a new tab). (ht @maragoni  (opens in a new tab))

(Marc Levin/Flickr)