Discover the secrets to an effective and efficient social media audit.
Social media marketing can be powerful, impactful, and a lot of fun. At the end of the day, however, it must deliver meaningful results. If you don’t like what you see from your 2022 data reporting and are unsure what the problem is, ask yourself: Is it time for a social media audit?
The word “audit” may sound a little scary, but don’t worry — the IRS will not be involved…at least, we hope not! Regularly reviewing your social media marketing goals, strategies, and execution is integral to maintaining a successful online presence. And by following these few simple tips, identifying actionable areas of improvement can be quick and easy.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to approach auditing your social media, as well as provide an essential checklist to make your process a breeze. Continue reading below to discover more.
Is It Time for a Social Media Audit? These Tips Will Help
What’s a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a thoughtful and thorough analysis of your current social media strategy. It includes evaluating your objectives, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as reviewing your performance and identifying actionable steps to address areas of improvement.
A successful audit should yield an in-depth understanding of your presence and provide valuable data-driven insights. It should include information about your audience, content, engagement, performance, and any other aspects of your strategy that you deem important. The end result? A clear picture of what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do to successfully meet your marketing and business goals going forward.
Other benefits of conducting a social media audit include:
- Making more informed decisions about your strategy
- Identifying new opportunities for growth and time-saving optimization
- Understanding your target audience and creating content that resonates with them
Simply put, a social media audit can help you generate better results from your digital marketing efforts and investments.
How Often Should You Audit Your Social Media?
How often to audit your social media depends on the scope and specifics of your strategy and digital marketing needs. It’s common for many companies to review their social media quarterly, but if your results are satisfactory and you don’t see any need for change, that may feel like overkill for you. Likewise, if you notice negative feedback or disappointing results, you may want to keep a closer eye on how things are going and audit your strategies more frequently.
One consideration to remember: as with many aspects of any business, sometimes meaningful results that can yield actionable information don’t happen overnight. For example, let’s say you have just launched an ad campaign, and the cost-per-click is higher than you’d like. Rather than immediately beginning to make adjustments, the solution may be as simple as letting the campaign continue to run, as that number may drive downwards on average over time. Remember to give your strategies time to work rather than “calling audibles” too early before clear insights can be determined based on the results.
That said, keeping an eye on the data is always a good idea, even if things are going well and you only perform a full formal audit twice a year. Again, it all depends on your needs.
How Do You Conduct a Social Media Audit?
Before you begin reviewing data, however, there are some critical fundamental questions you should first ask yourself. For example:
- Have you located and can you easily access every single social media account associated with your brand? This may sound obvious, but plenty of brands may have old, unused, or forgotten profiles bearing their name — or even accounts for which there is no documented login! If this is the case for your brand, start by addressing these issues before moving on.
- Is your brand consistent across all platforms, both in terms of the visuals and the descriptions and links? Having consistent branding— language and visual imagery — across your communication channels helps customers recognize your brand more easily and builds trust. Additionally, a profile with inaccurate business hours or a website link that goes nowhere does not reflect well on your brand.
- Are your accounts secure? With the size, scale, sophistication, and frequency of cyber-attacks increasing every year, cyber security is now more important than ever before. Tightening security on your social media profiles can feel like a hassle, but a breach would be far worse and can have serious financial consequences for your business.
Once you’ve ensured you are on top of the fundamentals, you can move on with your audit.
Social Media Audit Checklist
One great way to ensure your social media audit is a success: Follow a checklist step-by-step!
This approach can help you stay organized and can also provide consistent benchmarks you can look to year after year.
- Review channel performance. How is your content performing on Facebook versus Instagram? Do your posts always get shared on LinkedIn, but your large follower count on Twitter doesn’t engage much? Each profile has its own strengths and weaknesses.
- Review content performance. Are your posts themselves supporting your desired bottom-line business results? If so, how? And if not, why not? Are some posts driving more traffic to your website than others, and if so, what do those posts have in common? Are certain types of content most likely to drive conversions? Don’t forget to make sure your content is optimized for mobile devices, which accounted for nearly 60% of all global website traffic in the second quarter of 2022.
- Learn about your audience. The demographics of your audiences (information such as location, gender identity, age group, and interests) may vary from one platform to another and may also differ surprisingly from your assumptions. It almost goes without saying that understanding the expectations and needs of your current and potential customers is a big part of building a successful brand. Yet, many brands do not apply this awareness to their social media presence with the same diligence. Most platforms provide tools for understanding your audience, but at Sociality Squared, we turn to Sprout Social’s Analytics tools to speed up the compilation and understanding of valuable data across platforms.
- Optimize your workflow. A good social media workflow can be a true game-changer. With the right processes in place, you can streamline your efforts, stay organized, allocate resources better, and more. (We dove deeper into this topic in a recent blog post.)
- Create an action plan for improvements. Your action plan will be unique to your brand’s strategic needs, but there are some simple, actionable ways to get started. For example, post more of the kinds of content that perform well and less of the kinds that don’t. Additionally, by determining exactly what you want to accomplish, you can be more specific about what actions to take. For example, let’s say you have plenty of followers on Instagram, but they are not engaging with your content. In that case, focus on taking measures specifically designed to increase engagement, like creating shareable content, responding to comments, posting to your Stories, or posting when your followers are most engaged.
As you set goals for the future, don’t forget to make sure they align with and support your broader goals for your brand.
Reach Out to Discover More
By following an audit checklist, you can ensure that your social media marketing is effective and you are actively moving towards achieving your desired results.
If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, Sociality Squared can help.
Your custom Social Media Report Card and Action Plan will evaluate your brand’s social presence and provide a roadmap to improve your social media marketing.
Reach out today to start the conversation.
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