Social media plays a significant role in doing business. As a business owner in a highly competitive and technological world, you must keep up with the latest trends if you don’t want to get left behind. Thus, it is evident that maintaining a social media presence that actually helps your business can be a difficult task to do. A social media audit helps you with that. And in this article, we will be talking all about what that is, how it can help you and your business and why it is a vital task to accomplish.
What is A Social Media Audit?
A social media audit refers to the process of reviewing and evaluating your business’ current social media strategies, growth, and performance metrics. It identifies how your business is performing in the social media world. This is the process of looking at and analyzing metrics of your social media engagements, like the comments, shares, reposts, and impressions of all your different content. When you conduct a social media audit, you also look at how much of the predetermined goals of your social media presence were met and which ones are lagging behind. You should look at the different percentage changes for each metric that you set to look at. Your metrics can include engagement metrics, channel-specific metrics, publishing metrics, and referral traffic metrics. A social media audit can be done monthly or quarterly, or annually. The important thing is that you track your metrics over a certain period to visibly see the changes and the big-picture trends. A social media presence is not an easy thing to maintain and handle. Still, when you conduct a social media audit, you allow yourself to focus on efforts that actually work for you.
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Why Do You Need to Do Social Media Audit?
A social media audit allows you to gather necessary information for you to be more efficient and effective. Do you remember that experiment where we put the same kind of plant in different places, tracking each of their progress, and compared them? Social media audit is like that. It is looking at different types of content that you put out on your different social media platforms. Just like the plants, you have to take note of how far they grew at some point. And then, you look at and evaluate the different factors that contributed to its growth or its lack of growth. You observe and take notes and ask questions - is it because it didn’t have enough sunlight? Did you not water it enough? Is there something in its soil that the other plants don’t? Or did the temperature of its location affect its growth? You can now analyze and conclude the best set-up once you answer those questions with your observations and research. You can decide what factors and what combinations work best so that you can apply it to all of your other plants. This is similar to how your social media audit works. You look at your social media profiles and accounts and see what works best for your business and what doesn’t work at all. This will give you a lot of data to work with to direct all your efforts towards the right endeavor. In summary, your social media audit does these three essential things for you:
- Social media audit lets you know what works.
- Conduct a social media audit and discover what isn’t working.
- A social media audit lets you answer questions about your relationship with your audience.
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How Do You Do Social Media Audit?
Now that you know what a social media audit is and why it is crucial, you can learn how to do a social media audit for your business.
1. Locate Your Social Media Profiles
It seems logical to start your social media audit by looking at all your existing social media profiles, so start there. This might include all the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But also remember to look at the other social media platforms you haven’t been focusing on for the last few months - or even years. You need not necessarily reactivate them, but it helps ensure that they are still under your authority, control, and management. But in addition, when you conduct a social media audit, you also give yourself the chance to discover the potential of any of these social media profiles. Once you complete your list, you then decide what social media profiles you want to focus on. You probably have your favorites, the ones that you are most frequently posting in and using. Still, a social media audit can give you a much more relevant insight into what actually are your top performers. This list of social media profiles will be your foundation for the rest of this process.
2. Reestablish Your Brand Identity and Goals
When you conduct a social media audit (or any kind of audit, at that), you have to know what goals, objectives, and identities you have already established. See, when doing an audit, what you’re evaluating and looking at is how your business and your social media presence are doing according to who you are and what you already set out to achieve from the start. You must have a thorough understanding of your brand identity and what you want to do with it. If you don't have that, you can be going around in circles looking at data but not knowing how you can apply it to your business and social media presence. When you conduct a social media audit, you look back at your goals and place them side-by-side with your current performance. This way, you can properly evaluate your progress based on your business objectives.
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3. Record Information
The next step in your social media audit is to organize a complete record of all your social media profiles. Here, you have to make a record of your URL, the roles of those who have access to it and are managing it, and its number of followers. You need this information to more appropriately and more orderly collect the data that you need. You then look at and record the performance of each profile. You record your profile update frequency, and how often your followers and non-followers engage with each of your profiles. These engagements mean that people who see your content respond, re-story, or repost them. You collate and summarize them so you can see the relationship between how frequently you post and how much they engage with you. You can use many tools to do this, but you can also do it manually and on your own.
4. Check for Completion and Consistency
Completion and consistency are two of the most important aspects you have to look at when conducting a social media audit. Completion means that your social media profiles are filled up to the brim with information that is helpful for your potential clients to get to know you best. This means that if a social media account allows you to put in your name, biography, profile picture, location, website link, other social media accounts, etc., you should fill all of them up. This ensures that you are using the full potential of all your social media accounts. On the other hand, consistency talks about how uniform your content and your social media presence are. Your content in the different social media platforms you use must send the same messages, use the same tone in the language, and follow one theme. In addition, they should not just match each other; they also should match your business’ brand identity. This means that your brand name, brand colors, and other elements of your visual identity and brand philosophy are consistently presented in all your different social media profiles.
5. Assess Opportunities and Rooms for Improvement
Now that you have enough information on your hands about your social media presence and their progress, you can now summarize all of them and look at them together so that you can make up your conclusions. This means that given the data you collected, you should tell what you have learned about your brand, your business, and your marketing strategies. The end product of your social media audit is a record and recommendations. It gives you a record of how your business is currently doing. It tells you exactly which of your efforts are doing best and which you need to improve some more. It gives you an insight into the progress you have achieved so far while also giving you an idea about what you can do to further advance your brand and your business. You look at both the opportunities and rooms for improvement. This way, you can come up with the right recommendations and plans to achieve all your goals.
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Strikingly is a website builder that allows you to connect your social media profiles to your website and even let you display your social media feed. In addition, your Strikingly site editor also allows you to track your website’s performance and will enable you to see the sources of your traffic. These sources can and may include most of your social media profiles. Let Strikingly help you conduct a social media audit and sign up now!
