To understand how to conduct a social media audit, you need to use social media to market your business.
Social media audits aren’t as terrifying as they may sound. The development or updating of a social media marketing strategy goes hand-in-hand with this.
Analyzing your social media accounts provides you with detailed information about how the networks are performing.
The following guide includes all the instructions you need for performing a social media audit effectively.
What is a Social Media Audit?
An audit of your social media campaigns is nothing more than your organization’s roadmap to social media success. It allows you to keep track of all your social media metrics in one place.
By regularly updating your social media audit, you will have the ability to tell what is working, what isn’t, and what needs to be improved. Your brand’s monthly social media performance can be monitored with ease by pulling in data from all of your brand’s social media accounts into a spreadsheet. You can use it to determine how well a season has performed.
How to Execute a Social Media Audit
Social media audits follow certain processes to ensure their completeness. These processes include:
Keep each account up-to-date and in-line with your brand
Take the time to review each account thoroughly after you’ve logged everyone so that you’re sure it’s consistent with your corporate image.
Each social media account must be examined separately. Please check your brand voice, hashtags, and images against the brand style guide to ensure they are current.
Each social account should be checked based on the following elements:
Handle(s)
Is it possible to manage your social media accounts across multiple platforms at once? As a general rule, if you can, you should. Depending on the purpose of your accounts, you might need different handles. Ensure your handles are consistent across social platforms by checking your notes if you need to make updates.
Profile/bio text
A social media bio has a limited amount of space to work with, so you need to utilize it effectively. All fields should be filled out with current brand messaging and be filled in completely and accurately.
Links
Make sure you link to your homepage, an informative landing page, a recent blog post, or an ongoing campaign. Although not all your social accounts need to link to the same page, it’s vital to keep track of what you’re linking from where.
Profile and cover images
Follow the social network’s requirements regarding image size and ensure your images match your brand.
Pinned posts
Be sure those pinned posts remain relevant and up-to-date by evaluating them regularly.
Verification
There is no more to it than a yes/no answer. Do you have a checkmark badge on your account indicating your account is verified? Is it necessary to make it mandatory? For those who desire to achieve Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook verification, you can follow a simple verification process.
Monitor your entire social media presence
If you can remember all of your social accounts in your head, you may think you can list them all. Is that the case? You and your team should create a list of all the accounts you access regularly. This may cover some of your bases, but it doesn’t cover them all.
If your company did not have a social strategy, you might find old profiles. Then again, they might have been abandoned.
Alternatively, perhaps various units within your company have accounts on social media, but they are not organized or unified. You’ll have to do some legwork to ensure that your company’s social media accounts are properly audited.
Keep track of all accounts relevant to your search. If you need to research any accounts further, note them. There may be a problem with determining whether the account was created by someone at your company or if it was created by a scammer.
Keep a record of all unowned accounts and the steps you took to have these accounts closed in your audit document. Contact each account holder directly to determine the source of the problem, since it may be a communication breakdown or an overly passionate fan taking things too far. When you can’t resolve a matter on your own, don’t hesitate to enlist the help of social networks.
Set up an account monitoring program once you’ve identified all the relevant accounts to track down future impostor accounts.
Also, you should identify social networks on which you don’t yet have an account. After that, you can think about whether they should be part of your strategy.
Assess the performance of the channels
This step tracks overall channel performance, rather than tracking the performance of specific posts.
The time is now for your company to develop a mission statement and set a few priorities for each social network.
Since you don’t know what you want to achieve when you evaluate your performance, it is impossible to evaluate that performance. An Instagram account aiming to increase follower engagement would not compare well to a Twitter account primarily focused on customer service.
Identifying the key metrics for each social channel you use should be part of your mission statement.
The most important metrics to track here are website traffic and conversions. It’s nice to have followers on your social channels, but the real ROI happens when followers become customers or leads.
Select your most successful posts
Keep track of the three most engaging posts on each account. In your social media audit template, include links to these top-performing posts. You can execute this process using several analytics guides.
Then, review these posts to see if there are any patterns. What kind of response do you get from posting photos? How about videos? Are people responding to your Facebook page posts in the same way as they do on Instagram?
Write your thoughts about the patterns you find in the notes column of your audit document. Next time you perform a social media audit for your company, test your theories and record your results. Your social strategy will take shape over time as you find new ways to reach your audience.
The best way to evaluate your best-performing posts is by tracking engagement. It might not always be the most effective metric for measuring engagement. If your brand is concerned about the effectiveness of posts, it may be better to base your judgment on conversions or referrals to your website. Analyze your top posts to find patterns based on the key metric you choose.
Track Results
You should compare your results with the same period last month and last year since it’s hard to evaluate social metrics in a vacuum. It will also become easier to identify any unexpected changes in real-time over time as you become more familiar with seasonal trends.
Decide which channels are right for you
As your social media marketing efforts are well underway, now is the perfect time to make some strategic decisions.
Consider the objectives you want to achieve for each account. Look at how each platform is performing right now, along with who you can reach through it. Your social media marketing strategy should be tied to each of these accounts.
Is the connection clear to you? If not, you might want to focus your energies on the channels that yield the biggest ROI and pull back on others.
Having decided doesn’t mean it has to be permanent. You could decide to concentrate on Facebook for a while, and then pick up Twitter when the next audit is done.
There might be a need to replace or supplement old social channels with new ones.
Estimate your return on investment
An audit of your social media efforts should include calculating the return on investment of each paid or organic campaign on any social network.
The amount of time and money spent on social media is a measure of the value social media brings to a company.
Know each network’s audience
It’s important to identify the audiences you can reach from each social media channel as you evaluate how each contributes to your brand.
You should start by looking at the demographics of your audience. Snapchat users, for instance, tend to be much younger than Facebook users, and LinkedIn users usually have a high income.
Your following demographics on various social networks vary, so you need to analyze them, since your follower list may not be the same as the entire audience.
Ensure channel ownership and passwords are standardized
You should assign responsibility for each social media account to one person, or maybe even a team, within your organization.
A well-performing account is consistently on-brand and up-to-date.
As well as approving payments on the account, this individual will guide its strategic direction. Those in charge of the account will decide who has access and at what level each individual should have access.
If you want to centralize your passwords, don’t give them to multiple team members. This means that you don’t have to change passwords each time someone leaves or moves within the company. As well as keeping your social accounts secure, it helps protect your privacy.
If you used a tool to control passwords, indicate that in your social audit document, as well as the channel owners. By the time you conduct your next social audit, you should have all accounts set up with centralized password control.
Repetition is the key
Having said that, a social audit isn’t something that happens once. Make sure that your accounts are performing as they should, and conduct regular audits to keep track.
Maintaining your social accounts in the best possible way is possible through a quarterly social audit. Also, it provides a way for you to compare your daily efforts with your social media strategy goals regularly.
Conclusion
It is time for social media campaigns to move beyond hunches and guesswork. To make their social media audits more meaningful, brands are using artificial intelligence to comb through the data. Due to this knowledge, they can quantifiably determine what works for them. It’s possible for you as well.
You should get a positive ROI from social analytics when it comes down to it. An audit of your social media accounts will get you there if not.
