A social media audit is the stocktake of your organization's social media performance and presence, as it helps you weigh up your brand's social media strategy.
Having a stellar social media presence for your brand starts with a social media audit. It is an integral part of developing an impactful social media marketing plan for your brand.
Social media audit acts as the guiding star that lets you see your growth possibilities, which profiles are outdated and need to revive or repurpose and provide brands with new opportunities to prosper on social and engage your audience. The data offered by the audit enriches social strategy to draw the maximum ROI.
In this blog, we have explained everything about conducting an effective audit of your social media channels. Drill deep and plan a social media audit, plan an effective social media strategy and propel your business growth on social media.
- What Is A Social Media Audit?
- What Should A Social Media Audit Include?
- Benefits Of Conducting A Social Media Audit
- How To Do A Social Media Audit: Steps
- Social Media Audit Best Practices
What Is A Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a process of reviewing your business's social media presence, where it is at, how it has grown, and finding opportunities to further expand your social media presence. A social media audit considers the metrics of the business growth, social media strategies, etc.
Social media audit of your social account helps to get a clear view of what's happening on each social network. You can spot and assess your social media activities, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and administer necessary changes to your social media marketing strategy.
Any business's social media presence requires an adequately prepared social media strategy. It takes time and planning to design an effective social media strategy.
It so often happens that companies jump into the social media world without much preparation and with no proper planning, hoping to take it one step at a time. Sometimes companies jump into the social media world, following in the footsteps of other companies and presences, without really taking the time to assess if the same strategies are working for their company.
A social media audit can help in times like these. It will let you know if your social media strategy effectively reaches your business goals.
What Should A Social Media Audit Include?
Before starting a social media audit, you need to create a spreadsheet, and should write down all the necessary data. It is essential because you may not remember all crucial information gathered during the process. As a starting point of your auditing process, make sure to jot down the results of the social media audit.
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Keep a record file or report of the audit. The information may interest people across different departments in your company. The marketing and sales department leverage the reports best to understand their effort of which social media posts are converting the most.
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When you have a single file of all your social media audit data, it aids you in comparing the results month to month, or year to year, depending on your needs.
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Specific marketing strategies pay off within a few months after the implementation, so it is crucial to assess the results analyzed for an extended period. It further helps you to glance the seasonal fluctuations. For example, a Christmas Sale or a Black Friday promotion might propel your promotional results.
Usage of templates and analytic tools such as Statusbrew makes the audit more accessible and readily available. You simply have to put the correct numbers in suitable spaces. And, of course, you have to customize the templates according to your company priorities. It is a straightforward process.
But whatever customization you do, you should never forget to include these bare minimums in your templates:
- Profile name and URL
- Publishing metrics
- Audience demographics
- Engagement metrics
- Referral traffic
- Channel-specific metrics
One more thing to remember is to include the percentage change of any metrics used from the previous month or year. It is always advisable to use percent changes of the prior year instead of the previous month, as a year-over-year comparison gives a clearer picture of the changes in numbers. In contrast, a month-over-month comparison can show skewed numbers, owing to varied business numbers in subsequent months.
Social Media Audit Checklist
A successful audit will encompass some universal points regardless of your industry or organization size. Following are the most common element of social media audit:
- Audience Insight – Based on your target audience demographic data, your message tone varies. Monitor which social media channels your target audience is on and frame your content based on that platform's algorithm and rules.
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Updated Bio– Your bio information and links you posted on your social accounts are up-to-date.
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Engagement Rate – Monitor the engagement rates and check out if your target audience is responding well to the content. Consider your follower growth and the content spread across social media.
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Publishing schedule – Track the frequency of your publish on specific social media channels.
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Referral traffic – Extract data about which social media channels drive the most traffic to your site.
All social channels vary in metrics, so you should create a separate Google spreadsheet for every platform. However, as a brand, you may not be present on each social media channel, but it's a good idea to keep track of all the developments in the social networks. Being an early adopter provides you with the competitive advantage and positions your company as an industry leader.
To minimize your struggle, you can rely on social media management tools such as Stausbrew. Statusbrew's newly launched Reports Lab helps you track social media data precisely, as there is a potential client behind each data. You can choose from a wide range of ready-made reporting templates or build your own with endless customization options using widgets.
You can export data into CSV or PDF files or live with team members and clients. Widgets also work in a cross-network way; it allows you to have different data from Twitter and Instagram or other social networks in the same widget.
All the Reports Lab widgets can be resized, reordered and repositioned by dragging and dropping. Statusbrew massive Reposts Lab offers 180+ Metrics across the industry, you can get insights on every single like, comment, view, message, and more.
To conduct your social media audit, you need not scramble from platform to platform; everything is available in a single place, and you can visualize it in a simplified way that is meaningful for your business and your teams.
Benefits Of Conducting A Social Media Audit
Conducting a social media audit offers you insights on your present social media profile status or the outcome of your social media campaigns. It further helps you track data on the connection between your company and your online audience.
A social media audit is essential to determine which of your social media marketing strategies successfully achieves the goals and which are not. The result of an audit is essential to make future strategies and plans. Let's check out why social media audit is vital for your organization:
1. Assess Consistency Of Your Social Profiles
An audit helps you track your content and data across your organization's social profiles. All of your social media profiles should be consistent, so by conducting a social media audit, you will be able to assess the consistency of your profiles across all social network platforms your organization is using.
An organization needs to be consistent on social media so that your audience doesn't get confused. Consistency means all your social media profiles should provide the same feel and information. For example, Starbucks Coffee have consistent profiles from Twitter to Instagram, and alike.
2. Track Metrics
Conducting a social media audit helps you track important metrics in order to track the progress of your social media campaigns and how your business is performing online. You can track metrics like: likes, shares, comments, views, mentions, key audience segments, followers, influencers.
With all the data in hand, you can determine whether you have achieved, exceeded, or fallen short of your organization's goals. For each goal, you can check whether your strategies have worked out or not. In this way, you can improvise on your strategies wherever you have fallen short of the goals.
3. Aids To Generate Quality Leads
A social media audit aids you in finding opportunities to generate quality leads through your ad campaigns. Ad campaigns in social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram effectively create engagement and lead, if marketed properly. You can analyze your marketing strategies and develop new tactics to run your ad campaigns by conducting an audit.
4. Determines Your Position
A social media audit can help you know where you stand against your competitors. You can determine why customers choose your brand instead of others and when they opt for other brands instead of yours. An audit can also help you know what strategies your competitors are following and what area you can concentrate on to gain more customers.
How To Do A Social Media Audit: Steps
Everything is a bit confusing the first time, but once you get in, you pretty much make yourself at home. But you will not need to break a sweat on your first time with a social media audit. Here are steps to follow for your first successful social media audit. You can simply repeat these steps for your subsequent audits, with simple changes made to it occasionally.
Step 1: Huddle Up Your Social Media Profiles
As simple as this might sound, this step means making an inventory of all your social media profiles. All means all social media presences. You must not miss out on even the most dormant-looking profile, that is a profile with minimum subscribers and activity.
If you have a profile in a now-dead network, you don't necessarily need to dig them up, but you should very well make sure that your company claims those profiles.
This step will let you know potential opportunities in specific networks that may have slipped from your notice earlier. Once you have huddled up all your social media profiles, you will know, or rather, be able to decide the platform that you want to devote more attention to.
When put side to side, you will see a clearer picture of the kind of performance that your social media profiles have presented in the past. You can leverage a tool like Statusbrew you consolidate all your social media profiles in one place.
Step 2: Define Network-Specific Goals And Actions
It essentially means for you to define correctly what you want out of which network, i.e., all social media platforms are frequented by a varied kind of audience. This means that different networks can be catering to one or more of the following social media requirements:
- Enhancing brand awareness
- Generating more leads and sales
- Boosting community engagement
- Growing your followers
- Increasing traffic to the website
Now, different networks could be catering to one of these unique requirements for your social media presence; one could be rapidly increasing followers, while another could be increasing sales. It is for you to find out which one is doing what and assign goals specific to a particular network.
Step 3: Maintain A Consistent Image
Consistency in branding goes a long way in increasing brand popularity and click-throughs and trust over your brand. So while conducting your social media audit, always make sure to double-check that you are consistent with your brand images on all the social media platforms you are on.
You can do this by double-checking that you are consistent with the following:
- Profile and banner images
- Hashtags
- Destination URLs and destination pages
- Bio and language of "About"
Step 4: Time For The Analytics
Once you have a clear idea of the profiles you want to audit, it's time to head to analytic tools. Analytic tools will effectively give you the data related to the profile's performance you want to audit. It will tell you how the profile has performed, the growth it has undergone, and the scope for improvement therein. You will further find out which profile has outperformed which profile and on what grounds. It will tell you what strategy you need to apply to your top performers.
Step 5: Identify Your Top-Performing Social Media Posts
The analytics tools will further let you find out your top-performing posts. It will effectively allow you to zero in on the kind of content your audience enjoys; it could be quizzes, contests, photos, or videos. You can easily find out the kind of engagement, impression, and reach these posts have enjoyed.
Doing this will let you know the exact kind of content that is popular among your followers, and building upon this, you will be able to create your content to make better customer connections.
Step 6: Funneling The Traffic
While your profiles and social media posts may be enjoying a huge fan following, it is essential to determine how many of these followers are ending up on your website after going through your profiles and posts. It will tell you the kind of post and the crucial channels in creating genuine and legitimate leads.
Step 7: Get The Demographic Data
Different social networks have a different set of audience, and hence, you need to address different platforms differently. An analytics tool will clearly show you the demographic presence on various platforms. Based on this data, you should keep similar audience data across all the platforms.
Step 8: Assess Social Media Platforms
While trying to make your inputs better, you should also assess the platforms out there to see the changes that they have made in their platforms. It will show you the opportunities to create newer posts on the platforms. It will essentially make you more relatable among your audience and put you ahead of your competitors.
Step 9: Newer Objectives And Action Plans
By this time, you have almost fulfilled the whole purpose of the audit. You have found out where you stand in the social media rush; you have essentially found out what changes you can make to your presence.
Building upon this, you should finally make new and modified objectives for your social media strategy and develop new and fresh action plans and items.
— Statusbrew - Social Media Management Tool (@Statusbrew) December 23, 2021
So these are the steps that you have to follow to conduct your first social media audit. While, as a first-timer, you may skip steps that may seem irrelevant initially, it is highly recommended that you follow all of these steps in your subsequent audits.
Social Media Audit Best Practices
To extract the most out of your social audit process, you can adhere to certain best practices shared by experts:
Understand The Business Model
Before starting your audit, assess, and understand your business model and objectives. If you are an agency, have an in-depth conversation with your clients about what marketing channel they use and what goal they are trying to achieve.
Try to figure out if the focus is to acquire clients or drive more traffic to the site, or you are just trying to build a social media audience to create brand awareness. Having a goal makes it easier to find out if the social content is aligned with the goals and if the content is helping you to achieve your target.
Social Media Tools
To track insights more deeper you can rely on social media tools to leverage data. Statusbrew reporting lets you see all the impact of all your social efforts.
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Right from the big picture to a single post, you can effortlessly get an idea of how the audience perceives your content and can make strategies accordingly in the upcoming days. Reports Lab offers you all the metrics and tools you'll ever need to build your dream social media reports.
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You also can choose from ready-made reporting templates or create your own with endless customization options using widgets. It allows you to filter down your metrics for your preferred social networks, social profiles, profile groups and more. You can share live report with non-Statusbrew users, and all the changes you make to the report will be updated in real-time.
- Furthermore, all the reports can be automatically delivered to your inbox as per your preferred time frame. The scheduled reports automatically arrive in an email based on your chosen interval. The big picture to single post overview is a great place to start with an audit.
Opt For The 80/20 Principle
The idea of conducting a social media audit is to make the work smarter. The entire process helps you track which platforms deliver the most significant results. You should leverage this information to implement the 80/20 rule. Propel work on the social networks that work best for your business.
For example, if Twitter and Instagram drive the most traffic, then allocate your resources such as your time, budget, and attention on those platforms.
Implementing more energy into just a couple of networks may create more results than diversifying. Ensure to shift your focus to just a few key areas. Sometimes doing less is more impactful.
Have Patience
Social media results take time until you have content that goes viral. It’s essential to translate that fact to your social media audit strategy. Your posts or tweets, or videos may not perform well in the first few days, but it does not necessarily denote it is a dead-end.
You should have a little patience and track results over time. Adopt an approach to look at metrics this month compared to last month or the same month in the prior year. It is a great way to assess emerging trends.
Wrapping Up!
A social media audit is an excellent way to optimize your social media strategy. But you have to be thorough with your audit to get the best results. If you simply look at the last few posts and assess them, it will not help your business.
Be precise enough to compare numbers and posts, learn about why there are differences from one week to another. The focus should be on figuring out what aspects you’re lagging, and so you can learn how to fix it.
In your entire journey of social media audit approach, Statusbrew can be a sure-to-go tool. With Statusbrew, you can leverage social data to develop effective decision-making.
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