Understanding a Social Media Audit
Social media marketing is arguably one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. Your business can improve its lead generation, conversion rates, and increase revenue with the right strategy. However, the best way to know if your strategy delivers results is by carrying out a periodic audit of all your media strategies and profiles.
What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a process of reviewing your social media strategies along with various metrics to ass the opportunities, growth and remedies to improve your brand’s social media presence. This review guides your social media marketing efforts on every platform, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. Through these audit reports, you can analyze your social media metrics and keep track of any changes.
A well-structured social media audit will help highlight what is working for you, what is not, and what needs improvement. Most businesses are encouraged to set specific intervals for carrying out an audit; this could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. This way, they can track the performance of their brand across various social accounts. Below are a few facts you should know about auditing your social media profiles.
Social Media Audit Checklist
When preparing your audit spreadsheet, there are a few things you need to consider – they can be classified as a checklist. The checklist is universal and can be applied across multiple industries. Here are common aspects of an audit:
Audience data
Your target audience plays an important role in determining the kind of message and channel of distribution. Your audit should help determine the platforms your target group is using; this way, you can tailor your message according to the platform’s rules.
Profile information
You need to keep all the information on your bio up-to-date, especially your contact info and the links posted on your social profiles.
Engagement rate
This is an opportune time to review the rates of engagement. Engagement covers how the audience is responding to your messages, your best performing posts, how fast your social media presence is spreading, and how your content is spreading across multiple platforms.
Publishing schedule
This helps you track how often you publish or post on specific social media platforms.
Referral traffic
Auditing your referral traffic helps determine which social media channels drive more traffic to your website.
A social media strategy is spread across multiple profiles. However, each profile has its own metrics, making deploying an umbrella audit difficult. To get a clear picture, you need to create a separate Google Docs spreadsheet. Here are a few steps to help you perform a social media audit:
- Track all your social media accounts- and go over all your social accounts, including inactive ones. Be sure to search the internet and social networks for any accounts you may have missed that are affiliated with your brand.
- Make sure each account is complete and on brand- once you have listed all your accounts, take time to go through each of them to ensure they are consistent with your current brand image and standards.
- Identify your best post- for every account, narrow down to at least three of your top-performing post. Be sure to include links to these posts on your audit template.
- Evaluate channel performance- here, you will look at the overall performance of your account instead of focusing solely on the posts.
- Calculate your ROI- as part of your audit report, you need to calculate the return on investment for every marketing strategy you run on your social profile, paid or organic. This data should be collected within the intervals set for the audit.
- Understand the audience for each network- take time to review your audience and ascertain which channels are appropriate for which audience.
- Decide on Channels- once you have all the data, you need to start making strategic decisions – one of which is where to focus your social media marketing efforts. Take into account each channel’s performance, their current standing, and your target audience.
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