Conducting a social media audit is the first step in any social media strategy. If you plan to use social media marketing for your business, you need to know how to conduct a successful social media audit.
Social media audits are not as scary as they sound. Auditing your social media presence helps you understand what’s happening across all your platforms and how each one fits into your marketing goals. Social media is constantly evolving, so it’s always important to watch for new platforms, audiences, and features.
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What Is A Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a step-by-step procedure to track, compile, and evaluate the current state of all your social media accounts in one place. A social media audit reviews your business’s social presence with the end goal of understanding growth and opportunities and learning what can be done to improve. It is also very important to think if all of your digital marketing is connected with your social strategy by evaluating it relative to the digital marketing landscape.
Why is it Important To Run A Social Media Audit?
Businesses can use social media to learn more about their customers and build their brand’s reputation. Here, you can check why social media is important for a business. If you’re not willing to spend time doing a social media audit, let me explain why it is essential to improve your social presence.
Choose The Right Social Media Channel
Conducting a social media audit helps you determine which social media channels align with your audience and which ones don’t. Depending on your target audience, you can focus more on your social channels that are doing well.
See The Real Growth
With the quarter-on-quarter (QOQ) and year-on-year metrics, you have the full picture of social media growth. With a proper audit, you can identify real growth drivers.
Set Goals
A social media audit structure enables you to track and review KPIs aligned with your marketing objectives.
Social Media Checklist
Successful social media audits include some common elements. These are a few of the essential things to do to audit your company on social media:
Audience data – depending on the composition of the audience, you should use different social media channels you send your message. You need to target the correct social media platform according to the rules.
Profile information –You have to make sure all your bio information and links you posted on your social accounts are up-to-date
Engagement Rate – Which posts are getting the most engagement, current user engagement, how active your follower count increases, which posts are being shared across social media, etc.
Publishing Schedule – Monitor how often you publish on specific social media channels.
Referral traffic – You have to know which social media platforms drive the most traffic to your website.
Also Read: Unlocking Efficiency: Top Free Social Media Management Tools for Your Business
How To Run A Successful Social Media Audit?
If your company has a social media presence, the following social media audit procedure will be perfect for you.
Know Your Audience
Before diving into evaluating content and interactions, you must first have a deep understanding of your target audience. Look at what the top customers of your business might want to replicate or ask them directly.
You should know the answers to these questions about your target audience:
- Which social platforms are they on?
- What topics do they respond to?
- What do they talk about on social?
- Which hashtags do they use?
- What are their goals and challenges?
- How do they interact with various types of content in general?
- How do they interact with your competitors?
- Do you have potential customers in different segments concerned about other things?
Make sure you understand your audience so you can create social content that answers their questions, excites their interest, and gets them to engage with you through likes, comments, shares, clicks, and web visits.
All social media platforms have different metrics, so you have to create a separate Google Docs spreadsheet for every social channel. Find all the social profiles you have set up. There’s a chance you logged in to Instagram or Snapchat only once a few years back, but the profile is still there.
If you have social media profiles, but you are not doing any activity on those social channels, it negatively impacts your brand’s image and social presence.
Audit Your Social Media Profiles
To audit your social media profiles, there are a lot of important metrics you have to follow. I recommend taking a closer look at the numbers for:
- Engagement
- Shares
- Impressions
- Referral traffic
- Clicks on links
Content with many shares and engagements over time will be more valuable than content with a high number of views. The best way to determine the level of engagement is to compare the number of people interacting with your content instead of simply measuring the views.
Recognize The Content That Matters
Social media audits are a way to identify posts that resonate well with your audience by analyzing data from all of your channels. It can be difficult to compare posts across channels because everyone uses different metrics, but it is still important to stay on top. That is the reason you can use different social media tools.
Social media listening tools don’t gather historical information, so give it a couple of days to collect sufficient data. You’ll find the most important data in the Analysis tab.
- The most famous authors
- The most famous mentions
- Estimated social media reach
- Social media interaction
- Social media likes
- Social media comments
Audit Your Brand Presence
Every social channel gives you a chance to introduce your brand. You have to ensure that your audience knows immediately that they are looking at your company’s profile. Consistency is key. Start with your photos. Most social media platforms allow you to upload up to two photos. Upload your profile photo on every social media platform you have.
Secondly, check the URL you provide with your bio information. It’s easy to forget that you change the link once for a particular campaign that’s no longer running.
You can verify your profile on some social media channels. A verification will give you an additional boost to the awareness of your brand as your audience will immediately know that they are in the right place.
Evaluate Each Channels ROI
I know it is a challenging situation to evaluate the ROI from your social media activities. You can count the number of conversions from social media channels, but what to do when conversions are not one of your main goals? What if you want to focus on brand awareness? Or sales inspired by social media but do not come directly from social media?
An ROI is an important part of your social media audit. It will stop you from spending resources on activities that will never deliver any value to your company. You can trace the number of downloads of an eBook or any other dedicated content. Google Analytics will help you measure the number of organic traffic or sessions on your website.
The Benefits Of Social Media Audit
Let’s discuss the benefits of social media audits. Let’s start with short-term goals. A social media audit will help you determine where you currently are with your social strategy. It will recognize top-performing posts, key insights, and the best-performing social channels and help you create new goals, like working on your engagement metrics, growing your follower count, reaching a brand new audience, or other social metrics.
Conduct a social media audit to help influence the popular discussions on your brand conducted on the Internet. It is much better to focus on your target market and gain influence in brand promotion.
A social media audit will provide you with guidelines that you can use across many different social channels to ensure that your overall social media presence is consistent and makes your brand easy to identify.