How to Conduct a Social Media Audit That Brings Your Brand to Life
We all know that social media marketing takes strategic planning, tracking results, and conducting social media audits to deliver a strong brand presence. With the constantly evolving social media landscape, you can expect there will always be new ways to maximize your channels for your business.
With that, social media managers, business owners, and marketers need to keep a close eye on the latest trends and emerging features to successfully leverage social media. That’s why it’s important to conduct a social media audit. Â
Auditing your social media presence will help you understand what’s happening across your platforms and how they fit into your overall marketing strategy. With this checklist, it’ll make conducting your social media audit super easy.
A social media audit gives you a full view of how well your social media efforts are working for your business. It’s the process of reviewing certain business metrics to evaluate your current social media strategy and what can be done to improve your social media presence.
It typically include these details:
Let’s start by taking an inventory of all the social media profiles that your business currently has, including the ones that you may have never posted or are no longer active on.
Record all the KPIs relevant to each channel such as the number of followers, engagement metrics, publishing metrics, and so on. If there are networks you’re no longer active on, make sure they’re claimed and under your company’s control.
In addition to the accounts you have, think about the ones you don’t. This could be an opportunity to consider other social platforms that might be good for your social strategy—if not for now, then for the future.
When it comes to branding on social media, consistent branding is a must! As you audit your social media accounts, make it a point to check through your profiles to ensure that you’re using the same style and brand voice.Â
For example:
Social media platforms generally have built-in analytics features (these provide helpful insights and information). Record the engagement metrics, demographic information, top posts, impressions, and reach—this data shows what each platform’s strengths and weaknesses are for your business.
By highlighting your top performing social media posts, you’ll be able to filter out what types of content you should be posting. Which posts get the most engagement? Are they question-based posts? Short-form videos? Tutorials?
Here are a few ways you can categorize your posts:
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Plus, you can analyze them to spot patterns of the type of post and how your audience is engaging with your content. What demographic is most commonly engaging with certain types of content?Â
These findings give you a clear picture of what works well on each channel in terms of content type and your chosen content pillars. Then you can focus on fitting more of this type of successful content into the next social media calendar!
This step is important when it comes to checking how well your channel is contributing to your overall marketing goals. Several social media accounts may have similar goals such as driving website traffic. On the other hand, there may be other channels that are exclusively for building brand awareness or customer service purposes.
That brings me to my next point—listing out goals for each network.
One of the ways to track progress of each channel is to benchmark it against the goals you’ve set for it. Be specific about the goals. For example, if they’re measurable goals like website traffic, write down the numbers. Then you can track how many website visits came from that selected social media channel. Similarly, for goals without quantifiable metrics, you can track it with supporting evidence. If your Instagram account is to grow brand awareness, has your following grown? How about your organic and paid reach?Â
Your social media goals should be about how social media can benefit your business such as:
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Fortunately, most social media platforms come with built-in analytics features that provide a lot of helpful insights. This data can show you what each platform’s strengths and weaknesses are for your business.Â
Remember that when it comes to your metrics, the context of your goals matter. This means that while you might be growing your TikTok followers faster than on Facebook, the latter might result in more converted customers.
Of course, consistency is key when it comes to conducting a social media audit too. Whether that’s on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, auditing your social media profiles at regular intervals helps to make it effective.Â
One of the best practices to complete an audit is typically to compare your social media metrics and insights to the previous period. For example, tracking year over year metrics can help you account for seasonal changes over fleeting trends and festivities. Over time, this allows you to refine what’s not working, double down on what is, and spot issues efficiently.
Best to consolidate your social media audit documents in one place so you can easily review past records. Otherwise, you can use social media audit tools such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social.
You might already be putting a lot of effort into the major social media platforms and underutilizing others. So, if there’s an opportunity to explore potential options, go for it! A social media audit might help you uncover opportunities that are a perfect fit for the unique features of networks you’ve been missing out on.Â
Who knows, by becoming an adopter of the new platform, it can help you position yourself and thrive before your competitors.Â
The next step is deciding which platforms you want to focus on. A proper social media audit can be an eye-opener in terms of which profiles are actually your top-performers.
Lastly, here’s how you can take action: think about ways to improve. Revisit your notes from earlier steps as you plan the next month or quarter ahead.
Here are a few prompts to ask yourself:
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These will help you in your content creation process as well as your overall social media marketing strategy. Of course, successful marketing depends on tests and experiments to find what works best for you and your audience. Don’t be afraid to take risks and remember that your social media audits will be there to indicate if you’re on the right track or off course. If you have any new ideas or strategies, write them down in your marketing plan! (I’d like to think of ours as a living piece of document that we update frequently.)
Managing multiple social media profiles can be a lot of work. Conducting a social media audit can help you determine how to best utilize your efforts and resources. Then you can make the most out of your business’ online presence on social media.Â
Are you looking to save time and improve your social media game? We’re here to help. Get in touch with us at hello@medianetic.me, or drop us a message via our chatbot below! We look forward to partnering with you.
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