A strong and effective social media presence is crucial for your overall digital marketing strategy. However, it’s not enough to create profiles on social media platforms and occasionally post an update. There’s an analytical part of social media, especially if you want to quantify how well your social media strategy assists your bottom line.
This is where a social media audit comes in. A comprehensive audit can help you determine what’s working, identify areas of improvement and optimize your social media strategy moving forward. In this article we’ll look at:
• What Is a Social Media Audit?
• Benefits of a Social Media Audit
• How To Conduct a Social Media Audit
• Best Practices: Social Media Audit Checklist
• When Is the Best Time To Conduct an Audit?
If you haven’t audited your social media accounts, you’re due for one – and here’s what you should know about the process.
What Is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit reviews and analyzes your business’s presence, performance and strategies across various social media platforms. Using social media audit tools, you can evaluate their effectiveness and areas for improvement and then adjust your social media strategy based on data-driven decisions.
A social media audit aims to ensure that your efforts align with your overall business objectives, target audience and brand identity.
Benefits of a Social Media Audit
A successful social media marketing campaign is more than posting content and responding to comments and direct messages. Beneath all the creative content, social media analytics paint a picture of how well your social media efforts do at driving users to convert. By conducting a social media audit, you can:
• Make Data-Driven Decisions: Should you be running social media ads on this platform or that platform? Should you make an effort to create multiple video formats for various platforms? Can we justify the time we spend on this platform? These questions can be best answered if you have the data from audits.
• Maintain Your Brand: Having a consistent brand voice helps you dictate how users see your brand. Through proper social media brand marketing, you can improve how users see you compared to other brands and turn your brand into an asset that drives conversions.
• Improve Time Efficiency: An audit may take time out of your usual social media tasks, but it can be beneficial in the long run. By determining low-performing posts, you can see which content types should take less time.
• Conduct Content Analysis: A social media audit can help you determine which types of content resonate with your audience, allowing you to prioritize and develop content themes that will drive engagement and growth.
• Optimize Social Media Presence: During the audit, you can ensure that your social media profiles have up-to-date information, consistent branding and optimized descriptions. This will help you maintain a professional online presence and make it easier for users to find and connect with your brand.
How To Conduct a Social Media Audit
Social media audits are best conducted by those with experience in social media management. While some steps may vary depending on your business, there are general steps to add to your social media audit checklist.
1. Take Inventory of Your Accounts
This includes all active and inactive social media accounts your business has. This allows you to define which platforms should take priority or which have more traction than expected. You should also be aware of unofficial and fake accounts representing your brand.
2. Set Specific Goals
Some social media platforms work best for specific goals. These goals can range from brand awareness, lead generation, community engagement and diverting traffic to your website. If you have previous metrics, you can set goals based on what performs best in certain aspects.
3. Establish Consistent Branding
Compare how each profile is built and ensure branding consistency. These include:
• Checking if your brand is using outdated seasonal campaign materials
• Similar language in the bio or About Us section
• Matching profile and banner images
• Consistent use of hashtags and links
Ideally, you should have a style guide file that ensures a consistent voice and branding, especially if you have multiple people working on your social media team.
4. Analyze Your Social Media Metrics
Using your social media analytics tools, examine metrics such as audience growth, engagement, reach and conversions to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Evaluate the types of content being shared, the frequency of posting and the consistency in brand messaging and visual identity across all platforms.
5. Evaluate Your Demographic Data
You should already have a target audience. However, if your demographic data shows that that isn’t your main demographic, it could be a sign that you aren’t creating content that resonates with your target audience.
For instance, using Gen Z terms to say that your products are a “slay” or a “W” might not be understood by older audiences. Consider your audience’s age, gender and other background factors when creating content moving forward, or see if your target audience should be modified to cater to a different audience.
6. Identify Opportunities To Optimize
Once you’ve filled out your social media audit template, you can observe what works and what doesn’t. From there, you can identify ways to optimize your social media presence, such as updating profile information, improving visual branding and targeting a more relevant audience.
You can set new goals or develop a new social media strategy to adjust based on your findings. Once you have that, you can share your findings and recommendations with your team, managers and other stakeholders.
Best Practices: Social Media Audit Checklist
Follow these tips to ensure you’re getting the most out of your social media audit.
1. Use a Social Media Audit Template
Having a social media audit template sets a standard for every audit. You can find plenty of social media audit templates online, choose from various social media audit tools or customize your own depending on the data and analytics you’d like to see from your audit. Ideally, your template should have the following:
• Profile information (name, social media platform, URL)
• Metrics for:
○ Engagement
○ Publishing
○ Audience demographics
○ Referral traffic
• Any channel-specific metrics relevant to the platform
2. Compare Your Data
Place the data you get from your audit onto a spreadsheet. This makes comparing the metric changes from the previous month or quarter easier, depending on how often you conduct social media audits. This can provide you with more insight if you want to track your social media management’s performance.
Tracking your social media analytics through year-over-year metrics can help you account for seasonal changes. For example, you wouldn’t want to compare your performance from November to December during the holiday season with the rest of the year, as it could lead to skewed data.
3. Develop a Content Strategy
Conducting a content analysis during your audit can determine what works best for one platform. Analyze the effectiveness of your content in terms of engagement, reach and impressions. Look for patterns in publishing frequency, post type and content format to determine what works best for your audience.
Based on your content analysis, create a comprehensive content strategy to guide your social media efforts moving forward. Outline how often you will post on each platform, the types of content you will share and the metrics you will use to measure success.
When Is the Best Time To Conduct an Audit?
If you’ve never had a social media audit done, you’re most likely due for one as soon as possible. Moving forward, how often you should have one can depend on the size and industry of your business. Most businesses should have an audit done every six months to a year. However, some companies can benefit from a quarterly audit and fine-tuning their social media marketing plans as needed.
Scheduling regular audits allows you to review your social media presence, assess its effectiveness, identify areas for improvement and ensure that your accounts are aligned with your goals and objectives. Additionally, if your business is rebranding or something like a security breach compromises your social media accounts, it’s best to do an audit regardless of your auditing schedule.
Let Thrive Improve Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
Social media audits are necessary for a successful social media campaign. However, it takes years of experience with social media management to understand the data and how it relates to your strategy, especially in an ever-evolving landscape. Handling it alone may not be enough, especially when trying to find actionable insights that enhance your brand’s online presence and engagement.
In this case, your best option is to outsource your audit to a digital marketing agency like Thrive. Our social media experts have the expertise to understand the latest trends and data and optimize your social media for various industries. We can analyze and interpret data, as well as provide comprehensive reports that outline areas for improvement.
Our social media services optimize your business’s overall digital marketing efforts. We follow the best practices and take steps to reach your goals: brand awareness, community engagement or boosting your leads and sales. Let us help you identify hidden growth opportunities to improve your results.
Get in touch with Thrive today for a free audit and quote on our social media services.
