Madalyn Sklar

Developing the Mindset to Experiment

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A big part of social media, and especially Twitter, is trying out new features, content types, and messages. However, with every experiment comes risks and challenges. How then, can you develop a healthy mindset towards experimenting with your social media content? We invited social media mixologist, Jennifer Navarrete, to talk about being ok with pushing the limits. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Jennifer Navarrete
Topic: Developing the mindset to experiment
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: What do you mean by experimenting on Twitter?

Experimenting is trying new things. For Jennifer, that means, exploring new tools, changing up her usual strategies, or combining her Twitter plans with other platforms to see what works and what doesn’t. Hence the title, mixologist.

Jim explained with some examples. If you’re usually one to tweet text-heavy posts, try some emojis to see how your audience responds to the change. This also means trying features you normally don’t use like video replies or hosting a conversation in Twitter Spaces. If these ideas are novel to you, cast fear aside and try them. Who’s to say, your audience might resonate with your experiments much better than you expect.

Q2: Why is it important for us to try new things?

It’s in our nature to try new things. Whether it’s a new ingredient we’re cooking with or trying a restaurant in town, we’re always doing new things, whether or not we realize it. If you have an idea, try it. If it works, it works, and if it fails, it fails—after all, it’s only an experiment. At least you would’ve tried and known for sure rather than not knowing at all.

More importantly, however, publishing the same type of content may bore your audience. The occasional change could be welcome.

As Nicole added, the more you experiment, the better you become as a person and brand on social media. It’s the ideal path to personal and professional growth. Whether your experiments succeed or fail, you’ll learn valuable lessons in the process.

Q3: What happens when you don’t experiment enough?

When you don’t experiment enough, you stop being interesting and exciting. You’ll fall into a circular schedule and become predictable, boring. Being open-minded is the best way to keep your audience engaged in what you say.

It’s not only about your audience, though. As Rachel from Express Writers reminded us, if you’re not changing things up in your strategy, you will get bored too. That’s not a good place to be. When you’re bored, you lose motivation, and a lack of motivation in your own social media performance leads to poor community management.

Q4: Share some of your experiments that were successful.

Jennifer told us her biggest success came from an experiment where she interviewed businesswomen from across the world, through audio platforms like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse. What started as a simple experiment morphed into the Walk Talk Challenge podcast.

Another personal favorite, our guest told us, is her daily voice posts. She uses Twitter’s audio tweet feature to post snippets of audio-only advice that lasts 2 minutes and 20 seconds. That’s the cut-off for Twitter voice tweets, and our guest mentioned she now automatically closes out her audio tweets within the cut-off time. She’s received great feedback for this little experiment because, by nature, it’s short, sweet, and easy to consume.

Rachel told us about her experiments with threaded tweets. She explained how these tweets serve as a better alternative to lengthy blog posts.

Q5: Share some of your experiments that failed.

Our guest’s failed experiment was hosting a Space on Twitter while participating on a Twitter chat simultaneously. She learned that the audiences were entirely different from one another.

Christine tried something similar. She experimented with broadcasting her livestream to YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at the same time. If you think that’s a handful, you clearly don’t know Christine. 😉 She told us that even though some people enjoyed it, she didn’t get enough traction to keep doing it consistently.

Q6: What can we learn from failed experiments?

The most important lesson you can learn from a failed experiment is that it doesn’t reflect on who you are as a person. Take it lightly and consider them as information that you can use in your future experiments.

Pavel mentioned a similar point. When you have failed experiments, use that as an opportunity to identify what went wrong.

Q7: What can you learn from successful experiments?

Pat yourself on the back! You don’t always win, so when you do, make the most of it. Celebrate your wins! A successful experiment gives you a good content strategy. You’ll have generated great engagement from your audience, and it’s a business opportunity in the making.

As our friends from GiveWP reminded us, a successful experiment motivates you to keep experimenting and trying new things. Even if it scares you, it only takes one successful experiment to show you how great it is to keep doing it.

Q8: Share some ideas to experiment on Twitter.

Our guest’s ideas were to explore Twitter Spaces, and if that’s a bit overwhelming, try Twitter’s voice tweets. Use it to share your expertise.

JMatt shared another great idea: Observe what other people are doing. Implement the ideas that you like and learn from the ideas that you thought didn’t work. Just make sure that your experiments align with your brand.

Well, folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading through, and for more insights from our chat with Jennifer, check out this Twitter thread. If you think this summary was good, then you’ll love our live chat. Come see for yourself—we’re on #TwitterSmarter every Thursday at 1pm ET.

About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—technical and marketing copy to fill the pocket; haiku and short stories to fill the soul. A social media enthusiast, I’m a member of the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: Personal blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

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