After initially launching its organic post testing option for video in Creator Studio last year, Facebook is now rolling out an update, with a new layout, and expanded post options, helping to provide more guidance in your Facebook posting strategy.
As you can see in these screenshots, posted by social media expert Matt Navarra, Facebook’s new post testing platform now enables testing of different post formats, including text, link and image posts, providing more opportunities for your audience experiments.
For each test, you can choose a key metric to measure – either Comments, Shares, Reactions, People Reached or Link Clicks. Based on this, you can then formulate a test to optimize for your focus response, with each post variant then shown to a sample selection of your audience to measure how they react.
You can compare all elements of your post creative, including titles and thumbnails, while you can also compare image link and text posts against each other, while video can only be tested on a like-for-like (video-for-video) basis.
You can run your tests for up to 24 hours, which would then enable you to re-post or boost the most effective version, while also, again, providing valuable insights into audience preferences for future planning.
It’s similar to Facebook’s Ad Experiments in Ad Manager, which enables you to compare ad creative, with a view to maximizing spend. Organic post testing is a little different, in that you’re not definitively paying to maximize the best performer, but the concept and process is essentially the same, with an initial sampling of audience response driving better posting decisions.
In previous iterations, Facebook has ensured that organic post tests are not shown to the sample audience more than once – so if your follower sees the test post, he/she won’t also see the final version you go with, while only the final variation will remain on your Page, with the discarded tests being dropped from view.
Facebook has been refining its organic post testing tools for some time, with initial variations of organic post testing spotted back in 2018. It’s not clear if Facebook is rolling out this new version to all users as yet – we’ve asked for more info from Facebook and we’ll update this post if/when we hear back.
But if you do get access, it could be a good option, providing more direct insight into what Facebook users respond best to, and how you can either grow your audience, or drive more clicks, dependent on your goals.
If you do have access, you’ll be able to try out the new options by going to ‘Create Posts’ > ‘Create Post Tests’ in Facebook Creator Studio.
