When was the last time you conducted a social media audit?
Nowadays, nobody can deny the importance of having an online presence, especially for brands. The approach of either having a presence in any social media channel or just posting for the sake of posting can lead to a huge waste of time.
So, you might be implementing a social media strategy, but if you don’t audit or measure what works and what doesn’t, you will keep going blindly. Which means, you won’t know if the strategy is profitable, or you have to change it.
In this post, we are going to give you tips on how to conduct a social media audit in 30 minutes. A.K.A., a mini-audit. Yet, what’s more important, you’ll start developing an analysis capacity.
What’s a Social Media Audit
A social media audit is the process of reviewing your business’ metrics to evaluate your current social media strategy.
The data you get from it provides you some information which you will analyze and make the necessary improvements or changes.
What Are The Benefits Of a Social Media Audit
Your audit efforts will provide you the following benefits:
- Gaining a comprehensive understanding of your social media performance
- Assessing if you are reaching your social media goals
- Uncovering new opportunities to reach your ideal customer
- Discovering unhelpful social media activities
How Often Should You Conduct a Social Media Audit
We recommend you to run a once-a-year full-scale audit as well as monthly reviews.
It is true that some audits require more time and experts to run. But we are sharing a step-by-step audit process plus a free template, so you can do it too for your business.
How To Do a Social Media Audit In Less Than 30 Minutes: Step-by-Step
This is a step-by-step process that will help you to run a social media audit for your company.
1. Take Inventory Of Your Social Media Profiles
You can do that by searching the internet and the social media platforms.
It seems useless, because you already know which your profiles are. But stay with us.
The objective here is to analyze and explore new opportunities (maybe considering a new social media platform), bumped into old and forgotten accounts and spot fake or unofficial accounts
2. Check Consistency In Branding And Purpose
Make sure that all social media profiles align with your current brand image and standards. And more importantly, our social media accounts show clearly what we do, what we sell, and how we can help. Take into account the vision statement.
The information you can check out is:
- Profile and header images
- Bio
- Links
- Pinned posts
- Verified account
Related Content: 4 Brand identity essentials for social media
3. Identify Your Top-performing Posts On Each Platform
How can you identify this information?
1. You can use the analysis tools integrated into each social network.
- Facebook Analytics
- Instagram Analytics
- Twitter Analytics
- Pinterest Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
- TikTok Analytics
2. You can use these free & paid social media audit tools
- Planoly: It provides advanced analytics for Instagram, and basic analytics for Pinterest.
- Buffer: Access to audience demographics, account analytics and stories analytics.
- Analisa: AI-powered Instagram and TikTok analytics platform that gives you customized reports.
- HypeAuditor: A software that can help you with key features as audience quality score, growth and engagement rate.
- ContentCal: It includes top-performing post analysis, detailed follower analytics, and organic data for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Once you detect the best posts, look for patterns. The strategic tactic will be to create more content like this, although always within a category.
For example, we have a category “marketing strategies”.
4. Evaluate Channel Performance Overall
We can evaluate two main purposes:
1. Social Media Accounts Growth –
- Are we growing consistently?
- If not, what’s the cause?
2. Social Media Goals Achievement –
- What is the business objective?
- What are your social media goals?
- Are we meeting them?
- If not, could the results be improved?
Grab your social media strategy, and check if you met (or you’re meeting) your goals.
Now, if you don’t have them. It’s about time! You can set them up in the next step.
Related Content: How to build your social media marketing strategy
5. Set Goals For Each Social Media Platform
Here are some of the goals your company might want to achieve on social media:
- Brand awareness
- Web traffic
- Lead generation
- Revenue growth
- Brand engagement
- Community building
- Customer service
- Public Relations
- Social Listening & Research
6. Track Your Results With KPI’s
Once you pick your goals, select the right key metrics that you need to keep in your social media audit.
Here you have the KPI’s of the main goals:
• Brand awareness:
– Followers count – “How many people can you potentially reach?”
– Reach of your social media posts – “How many people have to reach each day / week / month?”
– Mentions, shares, and RTs – “How many people are talking about your brand or sharing your social media posts?”
• Web traffic
– Traffic from social media – “How many visitors are coming from your social media channels?”
– Share of overall traffic – “How much of your overall traffic does social media account for?”
– Bounce rate of social media traffic – “What is the quality of the traffic from social media?”
– Clicks on your social media posts – “How well is the messaging of your social media posts?”
• Lead generation
– Personal information (usually email addresses) collected through social media – “How many leads have you collected through social media?”
– Downloads of your gated content – “How many people visited from social media and downloaded your gated content?”
– Participation – “How many people participated in your social media contest or events and shared their information with you?”
– Clicks on your lead-generation social media posts – “How well is your messaging on those posts?”
– Conversions of leads from social media – “How good are the leads from social media?”
• Revenue growth
– Sign-ups / Revenue – “How many sign-ups or how much revenue are your social media channels bringing in?”
– Revenue from ads – “How much revenue is your social media advertising bringing in?”
7. Understand The Audit With The Swot Analysis
Once you’ve analyzed the audit to derive some strategic game plan for your social media marketing, you can build a new plan with the help of SWOT analysis.
Conclusion
Having a simple checklist on how to run a social media audit can be very helpful, to begin with.
Remember:
- Take inventory of your social media profiles
- Check consistency in branding and purpose
- Identify your top-performing posts on each platform
- Evaluate channel performance overall
- Set goals for each social media platform
- Track your results with KPI’s
- Understand the Audit with SWOT Analysis
Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help. We will be happy to guide you.