Social media marketing, is a much explored topic, but have you ever thought of social media audit?
An audit is like an inspection. You are checking to see if everything is working fine and how you can make it better.
A social media audit is when you take steps to inspect, evaluate and optimize a business’s social media page. You’re going to see where you are doing well on social media platforms and where you are not. You will assess your website to see growth, opportunities and fatal flaws that hinder your growth!
In this article we will look at the quickest way to do a social media audit. Why quick? Because not every business has the time to look into it in detail especially during the holiday season.
Before starting an audit, you should make a list of things that you are assessing. For both a quick and a slow audit, you need to make sure you are measuring the following:
- Name and URL
- Engagement metrics
- Audience demographics
- Publishing metrics
- Referral traffic
- Channel specific metrics
These are a must in all your audits because they give you the most important and most relevant information. They are both micro and macro topics. You can use metric tools like SPROUT to get insights from your social media accounts. There are many tools available, so be sure to take one that looks promising to what you need from a metric tool.
So how do you conduct a thorough but quick social media audit?
Step 1: Take stock. You need to list down all your social media accounts on every platform. And i don’t just mean the ones that you use regularly, like Facebook and Instagram… I mean EVERYTHING – even the Youtube channel with 10 followers or the Pinterest or Twitter account you created years ago for your business but never used. If there are accounts on platforms that you don’t use, then you don’t have to worry. But keep a track of them… maybe even cancel them if you think it’s not going to be of any use. On the other hand, if one of the channels or accounts poses as a good opportunity, then think of expanding on that platform as well!
Step 1: Define Goals for each network. Each social media platform is different and therefore the goals that you set down cannot be the same for everything. However, there are some common goals for each platform. Here they are:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating more leads and sales
- Increasing community engagement
- Growing your audience (think: followers)
- Increasing traffic to your site
The image above is a good example of how you can go about making goals for each page or each platform.
When you list down the goals from each platform, it helps you map out your performance better and it gives you a little bit of perspective. You could be getting more followers on Facebook than on Instagram, but it may be Instagram which is giving you more sales!
Step 3: Be consistent. This means that your brand, your advertising and your tone should all match. Check your social media bio, captions, stories etc. if you’re a sophisticated perfume brand then you cannot use kiddush or unsophisticated words. Your tonality must be consistent throughout. Check if this is the case. If it is not then you have to change and make everything go in a sync.
● Bio and “About” language – should match on all social media platforms. You can’t have a funky tone on facebook and an elegant one on Instagram, because it confuses your image in your consumer’s mind.
● Profile and banner images – should be the same on all platforms! Your profile picture (your logo) can’t be something on Twitter and something else on Snapchat. It should all be the same. You don’t see H&M keeping different profile pictures or banner images on their social right?
● Destination URLs and landing pages – they must have the same theme as your brand. They cannot be separate from you. If a consumer comes to a landing page, they should immediately be able to identify it as your brand’s.
● Hashtags.
Step 4: Social media Analytics. Many think this is the first step of the social media audit. No it is not. First take Step 1 to 3 out of the way. Only after you set the foundation, can you construct a building! All social media platforms have something called “metrics” which means they will show you your performance on those platforms. The best example of this is Faecbook and Instagram “INSIGHTS”. They tell you :
● Number of likes
● Number of comments
● Number of shares
● Number of saves
● Reach
● Engagement rate
● And much more.
These metrics help you understand if you’re doing good on that particular social media platform or not.
Step 5: Best performing posts. Not every post is going to do well. In fact, it happens so many times that the ones that you don’t think will do well actually might perform the best. The next step is to identify which post is the BEST PERFORMING post on that particular platform.
The best performing post will have the maximum number of impressions, reach and engagement rate OVERALL. It’ll be the optimum post when compared to the rest of the posts. Don’t worry, you don’t have to identify this manually. Because a lot of, almost all, the metric measurement tools measure this once you connect your account to their software.
You can even subcategorize the posts into :
– Image
– Video
– Promoted
– Reshared
And under each category, you can mark the best performing one.
Step 6: Check the link between your socials and your website. Use Google Analytics or any other free tool to see how well your social media platform and your website are linked. Your website can drive traffic to your socials and vice versa. Map out how your followers correlate with your web traffic.
Step 6: Demographics. Now look at your audience demographics. This includes their:
– Age
– Location
– Gender ratio
– Interests
– Behaviour
Each consumer is different but they can be grouped according to their demographic data. The more you know about your audience the better content you can give them. And the better your content on your socials, the faster you grow. In this step you can even see your messaging strategy with your consumers – do they like how you talk to them? What’s your reply time? Do you fix most of the issues? Things of that sort.
Step 7: Check out social media platforms you’ve never checked out before.
Not all businesses will have accounts on every social media platform to have existed. Some may have it on only the most famous ones – instagram, facebook, snapchat.
As a marketer you should never turn a blind eye towards anything. So when you are conducting a social media audit, then take a look at those apps and platforms that you don’t have an account in. Reddit, Twitter and Pinterest may not be as famous as the rest but always have their own advantages… and if you think one of these advantages is good for business – then go for it !
The final step.
Okay! So you’re almost done with the audit. You’ve taken care of everything and you’ve got things sorted, analysed and ready to go. The purpose of the audit was achieved. The final step is to set a goal or objective – FOR THE NEXT AUDIT. This audit and what you have achieved can’t be the last stage of your growth plan. So plan ahead… set goals and objectives that you want to achieve and see if you’ve done it by the time the next audit comes around!
