Do you want to learn the correct way to conduct social media audits? Well, you are in luck. This article will teach you all you need to know about social media auditing and how to get it right.
Over time, more and more businesses are trying to build an online presence because of its many benefits. Having a global audience can boost your business growth and revenue. However, achieving such height takes pulling the right strings. It is one thing to have an online presence. It is another to understand your performance online and how it impacts your business.
This is where social media auditing comes in. Brands and businesses looking to improve their performance should embrace social media auditing as it can help them figure out what is missing and what needs to be done.
What Is Social Media Auditing?
Simply put, social media auditing is an inspection of your social metrics to assess its performance, hidden opportunities, and how to improve it. It is similar to a financial audit of an organization, but this time, for your social media profiles.
Social media auditing involves analyzing your activities across all your existing accounts to get a well-detailed result. With this, you will learn if you are doing things correctly or if you need to adjust your social media marketing strategy to align with your business goals.
Furthermore, a social media audit displays your performance, areas that need attention, and other helpful reviews that will help you make the most of social media.
The best way to ensure that your business is on track is to conduct a social media audit monthly or quarterly. This way, you will keep track of trends while you get to make necessary changes when required.
7 Steps To Conduct Social Media Audit
Social media auditing is not as complicated as you probably think. So if you are conducting a social media audit for the first time, do not fret.
Below are the 7 golden steps to conducting social media audits.
Step 1: List Your Social Media Profiles
As easy as this sounds, you may be shocked that you may not remember all your social media profiles. That’s why this should be the first thing you do.
You can get a pen and paper and begin listing your existing social media business account. Popular networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter will be easy to remember. However, you may forget you once had a social media account on LinkedIn at the beginning of your social media journey. Search for your business on these platforms to see all your existing accounts, dormant and active.
When it comes to auditing, everything is involved, both dormant and active networks. An audit can make you see opportunities in old networks you have ignored.
However, if old accounts seem irrelevant, feel free to exempt them but ensure they are under control. After writing a list of your networks, select the ones that need more attention.
Step 2: State Your Goal For Each Network
Once you’ve listed the platforms you are active on, state your goal for each network. Remember, your goals should align with the metrics you want to track. These goals include increasing website traffic, community engagement, followers, sales, brand awareness, and more.
Setting these goals will help you know the metric to track on each social media platform in your review.
Step 3: Check The Uniformity Of Your Branding And Images
Check your social media profiles to see if they match your current branding style. When you do, ensure that your profiles are uniform in creativity, promotions, logos, and campaigns.
Evaluate whether your images match your brand style and the standard image size on the other accounts. Also, make sure that your username on each platform is the same. However, if the account serves a different purpose, there is no need to change it.
Next, the URLs on each profile should lead to the correct website or landing page. This step will help you know any off-brand content or profiles that need to be updated.
Step 4: Use Social Media Analytics
After successfully following the steps above, the next step is to use social media analytics to measure how much you’ve grown.
This is the time to know how close you are to achieving your goals or if you need to go back to the drawing board. Here, you will find out which social media platform pulls the most weight in your marketing goals.
If you are active on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and their likes, check which platform records the most engagement. Look out for metrics that matter, like followers, comments, views, click-through rates, sales rates, and more.
Overall, this exercise aims to measure the effectiveness of each social media platform.
Step 5: Find Out What Your Audience Love
Here you will figure out what type of content gets more attention and keep up with it. You can use different metrics to evaluate this.
The content with the most engagement and click-through rate takes the lead as the top-performing post. This step in social media auditing involves selecting your top posts on different social networks. Then you copy and paste the link into a social media audit tool and review them.
Depending on your key metrics, the post with the highest rate wins. That way, you can decide what type of content the audience loves. And keep creating them.
Step 6: Audience Demographic Review
Understanding your audience’s demography matters a lot. Social media platforms determine the type of audience you will find and their natural tendencies. For instance, Tiktok is dominated by younger people between the ages of 18-25, Facebook has an age range of 25-44, and Instagram has a population of people between the ages of 18-34.
What are your audience interests, age bracket, gender, and location? You may find out that your imagined audience is quite different from the actual audience.
To know how well you’ve impressed your audience, compare your followers against the number of engagement rates.
Step 7: Improve Your Social Media Marketing
After running these analyses on your social media profiles, think of new ways to boost your social media marketing strategy.
If your audience engages with video content the most, create marketing strategies around your discovery and get to work. You can start by posting more videos on YouTube and TikTok per week. When creating content, ensure that you speak to your audience with the right tone, so you don’t lose them.
For instance, If you find out your audience is mostly Gen Zs, but you’ve been communicating with them like millennials, you can change your tone and language accordingly.
After completing these steps, evaluate where you are against where you were to see your progress. You don’t want to spend time, money, and resources running a social media audit that does not yield the result you need.
Conclusion
Social media auditing is an essential part of business growth. You should make it a constant practice if you want to grow beyond your current level. The steps discussed in this article will help you get started.
If you need help promoting your business, we can help give your business the exposure it needs. Why not contact us today?
