For years, social media has been based on instinct. Some organizations tracked retweets, clicks, and shares, but lacked the data to easily find out what made their community share.

Social media A/B tests finally allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of anything your members share with real-time analytics. But it can be difficult to know where to start.

Focus on your Facebook headlines for big ROI

To get the biggest bang-for-your-buck, you should create and test different, potentially-compelling Facebook headlines. Sara Critchfield, Editorial Director at Upworthy makes the case, “If 11 words is the difference between 14 million more people seeing your content, isn’t it worth spending more time on it?”

Using ShareProgress’s social media A/B testing, you can write multiple headlines for Facebook and run a test to find the one that performs the best. Traffic is automatically routed to the best performing version. By the time your experiment finds a winner, your users will be sharing only the best-performing share language.

How Can I Improve My Headlines?

Now that you can measure their effectiveness, you can try some more ambitious headlines. Here are some tips for making them more compelling:

• Know your medium — You should write your share headlines to fit the context where they’ll be displayed. Your Facebook titles will show up on the newsfeed next to vacation pictures, cat videos, and various links that people found interesting enough to share. If looked at your own Facebook newsfeed, would the headline you’re writing stand out amongst all the other content?
• Want people to take action? Make a clear ask — In multiple experiments, including “Sign the Petition” in Facebook headlines increased the number of people who signed the online petition by 20% or more. Although clear headlines will receive fewer visitors than a vague, attention-grabbing headline, the visitors who do click will be much more likely to take action.
• Don’t be afraid to try new things — ShareProgress automatically stops using any Facebook headlines that don’t perform well in social media A/B tests. This makes the risk of trying out audacious, new ideas much lower, because if they don’t work, not many people will ever see them.

So, what are you waiting for? Go test some Facebook headlines!