‘Sign this petition’: How political groups are turning their data testing tools on social media

President Barack Obama's reelection campaign famously sent different e-mails to randomized groups of followers to determine which language would generate the best response. It also, to a lesser extent, helped popularize the idea of Web site testing — diverting a fraction of a site's visitors to an alternate version whose performance can be measured against the standard. Now we've reached the next evolution of that political strategy: applying those same sorts of tests to social media.

"Testing is critical, especially for smaller clients," said Serenety Hanley, a former Republican National Committee technology director who now runs a boutique social media consulting firm. "The smaller the client, the more vital it is to maximize their dollars." Serenety works with nonprofits and campaigns designing targeted Facebook ads and promoted posts. She then compares the performance of those posts against one another using tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights — information that helps campaigns understand which tactics are the most effective. Other groups have resorted to building their own social testing programs in-house. Among them is MoveOn.org, the progressive advocacy organization. While it doesn't seem as though Facebook supports segmenting your audience for more targeted tests, MoveOn can still pool together the aggregate data on links A and B and compare them at a high level.