Social media builds brands and helps keep existing brands in the business. It helps in acquiring customers and retaining old ones. It is a crucial part of digital marketing that shapes your brand online, connects with your customers, and improves your overall reputation.
The more effective your social media strategy is, the more of a return you will see on your efforts. A good place to start is with a social media audit.
A social media audit is a review of your business performance using metrics and numbers from social media. It is quantifying the online presence and what may help in improving that in the future. A company may need old statistics to compare the growth and statistics about the seasonal influx to get the right picture.
One cannot improvise without knowing how to plan and where to channel the resources. Conducting a social media audit to assess your strategies and plan better is no longer a secret. Learn why you should conduct a social media audit for better results.
In this article, we’ll discuss nine crucial tips to use for your social media audit and three reasons why you should continually run social media audits.
3 Reasons for constant social media audits
Assess how consistent your profiles are
A social media audit may help you see how consistent your profiles are in terms of content and relevance. Moreover, it is about how your profile appears to the public, profile image, and other features that make it functional.
The following should be consistent across profiles and regularly updated:
- Your bio
- Email address
- Links
- Pictures
These links and content do not need to be identical on all social media platforms; however, they should be consistent in terms of relevancy. You may check for broken links, expired offers, or a webpage that no longer works. For this, you may create a spreadsheet for all your socials and systematically track everything. Make sure that everything is cohesive and does not look out of place.
Generate leads with effective ad campaigns
You can assess your current ad campaigns and how they bring in revenue. This may help you see a unique selling point and design your campaign around that. You may discover more opportunities to generate sales on social platforms such as Facebook ads that also work on Instagram. Conducting an audit will help you build better strategies and place your campaigns more effectively across social media.
Discover how your online business compares to competitors
A healthy competition will help you work harder for more. It may help you uncover why a person prefers one company over another. You can learn important details like:
- How your company’s reputation compares with the competition
- How audiences respond to new tactics
- See what works and what doesn’t for others
- Dodge tricky situations by learning from the mistakes of others
Social media is transparent, and people like to interact with brands online. Therefore, you may stalk your competition, comments on social pages, and how they respond to these situations. This will help you come with new strategies with practical tactics and more information.
You may use their failures to build your success story and create a better campaign. With the help of assessing your competitor’s social channels, you can improve your own online reputation and learn how to maintain it to look better than others.
9 Steps to conduct a social media analysis
1. Assess your social media profiles
Checking your social media profiles is necessary as about 45% of people change their minds regarding a company due to a single negative review. It may even be an outdated product or service that may no longer be relevant. So you need to prune your social media for inconsistencies and maintain an authentic positive influence online.
Take a quick look at all your socials and see which ones are performing well. For instance, if Facebook and Instagram have more followers and revenue, concentrate on them first. If your YouTube channel did not work out, consider opportunities that may revive the chances of customer interaction.
Moreover, look for content on all socials that is outdated or may make your profiles look unprofessional. Get control over your socials and strategize the major ones to develop your brand’s voice.
2. Define specific goals for each network
Social media is quite vast and may get overwhelming if you try to juggle a lot. You may require a small list of goals to start and work on them instead of trying to fit in everything.
Common goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Creating more leads
- Generating sales
- Growing more followers
- Increasing organic traffic
You may conduct audits for different social profile engagements and assess them for defining new goals. See which profiles are bringing in more customers despite the size of the audience. Note your social media metrics around these new goals.
3.Use consistent branding, promotions, and language
Your online content must be cohesive with your ad campaigns and offers. Make sure your web information includes:
- A robust bio and about page
- Correct URLs
- Landing pages
- Profile images
- Relevant hashtags
These may differ on each social channel; however, try to create a similar vibe to connect with your audience.
Consider doing a content gap analysis to ensure your content is brand-related and how you may improve it. Your content strategy will only be as successful as your focus on the audience needs. Moreover, your content strategy for each social media channel may cover different campaigns to attract a wider audience.
For instance, brands like Starbucks have profiles from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Starbucks has 18 million followers on Instagram and 37.2 million likes on Facebook. Besides, the brand has more than 11.9 million followers on Twitter. All these people get something different on each profile; hence follow them everywhere.
4. Analyze your social media analytics
After pruning your content strategy, it is time for social media analytics. It will help you monitor if your goals are being achieved. Besides, these will give you an idea about improvements for future campaigns. The analytics metrics will provide you with the direct numbers, leaving no room for speculations for new strategies. If you need help with your analytics strategy, consider outsourcing digital marketing.
5. Identify your top-performing social media posts
Some social media posts perform better than others due to consumer interests and other demographics. It is crucial to learn how these demographics work and which posts are the highlight of your profiles. You may check the tone, quality, information, image, and offers in the post to assess how your customers perceive it.
Check the impressions, comments, likes, and shares to learn about the organic reach. This will help you plan for future posts on the same lines to improve engagement. Additionally, you may create new hashtags using hashtag generator tools, informational videos, and infographics surrounding these posts.
6. Assess your social media traffic
You need to learn how your website is performing in terms of your social media channels. This will help you identify which posts lead to sales and get new customers on board. You may use Google Analytics to see the traffic numbers and assess your online performance. The tool allows you to find this under acquisition with the social filter.
7. Dig into your demographic data
Now, your brand may be catering to more than one generation, and different content speaks to them. These may be based on age, gender, or your service uses. Therefore, you need to keep your audience in mind to prioritize content to provide the best customer experience.
Some tools may help you see your audience’s age, gender, etc. This gives statistics on how well your socials are performing for the intended audience. Note that your audience will show similar results across all platforms in social media demographic reports in an ideal situation. If you see any discrepancies, you may strategize to improve that.
8. Assess opportunities from new social media platforms
Social media is fast-paced and is constantly changing. As a result, you cannot stick to just one long-term goal and expect miracles. You may need to change your focus as per current trends and strategize accordingly. Each new generation is more inclined towards new trends and apps. This calls for the brands to keep up with the pace and create a presence across new platforms.
For instance, TikTok may seem like a GenZ gimmick; however, it is a huge opportunity to speak their language over this new platform. In a short period of time, the TikTok app has generated sales and garnered new users around the globe.
Audit new opportunities and see where you may incorporate them in your social media strategies. It is ideal to stay updated with new trends and viral moments on social media to cash in more interaction. Some brands use viral news and hashtags to encourage people to interact and share their posts.
9. Come up with new objectives and action items
This is the final step of your audit. Work on a plan for your future services and goals. Add these plans and assess where you may employ them on specific socials and at specific timings. You may create hype over a project so that the audience engages more.
Moreover, consider doing a SWOT analysis to learn about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for a precise assessment. You may see more opportunities surrounding your current strengths in socials. Use this data to strategize your new objectives. Make the most of the audit with the help of this analysis to gain new followers, generate more sales, and improve your online reputation.
Social media audit FAQs
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is a review of your business performance using metrics and numbers from social media. It is quantifying the online presence and what may help in improving that in the future.
What can you learn from conducting a social media audit?
You can learn important details like how your company’s reputation compares with the competition, how audiences respond to new tactics, see what works and what doesn’t for others, and dodge tricky situations by learning from the mistakes of others.
Do I need to conduct social media audits?
Yes. Social media audits are necessary for assessing the effectiveness of your social media efforts. You can learn things like how consistent your profiles are, generate leads with effective ad campaigns, and discover how your online business compares to competitors.
