How to run social media like a real-time testing ground

Most marketers still treat social media like a megaphone. Austin Price treats it like a nervous system. In this episode of Content Amplified, Austin, Director of Social Media at H&L Agency in Oakland, walks through how he runs creative as a hypothesis and lets data confirm or kill it before a campaign scales. He explains why engagement rate is his default metric (and how it gets gamed), the 24-hour read he uses to decide whether to pivot or lean in, and why a 100 million person reach against a 5 million person addressable market should embarrass everyone in the room. Austin also reframes the quality versus quantity debate as a consistency problem, points to Chad Powers and the Dr. Pepper jingle as proof that social is now the testing ground for every other channel, and makes the case that the comment section is the context layer that data alone can never give you. If you want a practical model for running social as a portfolio of tests, this episode is for you.

About Austin

Austin Price is the Director of Social Media at H&L Agency in Oakland. He started his career in video production and content creation at the Texas Christian University athletics department, where he was handed the school's Facebook account in the early days of social and never looked back. After earning an MBA to pair the creative side of his brain with measurement, he left Texas for California and moved into the tech startup world, building marketing funnels from zero. Austin is a self-described "test everything" practitioner who believes every creative risk should be backed with data, and that the comment section is the missing context layer behind every dataset.

Show Notes

- Connect with Austin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-price-63528338/