Social Media Platforms have billions of users and so they are one of the best channels to build awareness about your brand. Many brands have realized the business potential of social media platforms and got started with social media marketing.
Even the platforms have evolved a lot over the past few years to provide various tools for business owners to get an overview of their social media marketing efforts.
Problems You Might Face As a Social Media Marketer :
There are many social media platforms that are used by people across the world. So you might get confused about choosing the right one for your business as the demographics of the userbase of each platform differs from one another.
But to get the best results from your social media marketing efforts, you need to pick the right channels and focus more on that channels creating the content for those platforms specifically.
Moreover, you should also figure out the most engaging form of content for social media users who might be interested in the products or services offered by your business.
What is a Social Media Audit and Why You Need to Perform One?
The term “audit” might make your fear especially when you are doing it for the first time assuming it would be a super lengthy process which would take a long time.
But don’t worry it isn’t that complicated process. Before you read the steps to perform an audit let me tell you what a social media audit is and how it is useful. Social media audit is the process of checking various aspects related to your social media handles such as
- Number of profiles and completion of the information on them
- Key Performance Indicators like engagement, reach, etc for every content shared
- Who is responsible for handling the brand profile on a specific platform especially important if there is a big team of people working in the company.
Performing these audits, if you find anything is incomplete then you can easily fill in all the necessary information related to your business. This way any follower of your brand can access them on the brand handle on a specific social media platform.
An audit of the social media handles can help you figure out what channel and what kind of content are working for your brand.
This way you can save a lot of time on creating the type of content that is not preferred (engaging or liked ) by the audience interested in your business.
If you create the type of content such as video or image or article which gets more engagement then you can definitely observe a great change in the Key Performance Indicators as well as move ahead making the data-driven decisions as a social media marketer. Moreover, you can get a good Social ROI from the business.
How To Do A Social Media Audit?
So as you got to know the importance of a social media audit let me help you do one for your brand. In this article you are going to learn how to conduct an audit on three social media platforms:
Before we dive deep you must ensure to know all the profile names and links of your brand’s social media handles.
Acquire access to any social handles created in the past, by the owner or their employees or get them to shut down to avoid confusion for the followers of your brand profiles.
One of the best methods is to make a google search and find out what social profiles are being ranked in the search engine result pages. Make a note of the profiles which are with the business name but you don’t have access to them.
Also, choose the key performance indicators on each platform as they vary depending on the platform so that you can make a note of them while performing the audit.
For example, if you are considering a Facebook page, then good key performance indicators could be reached, engagement, follower count, etc.
Tools That Can Help You In The Audit Process:
1.Built-In Platform Specific Tools:
All the platforms have built-in analytics tools to measure various kinds of metrics and check the performance such as
- Facebook Insights
- Instagram Insights
- Pinterest Analytics
2.Social Media Scheduling Tools:
If you are scheduling the content on social media scheduling tools they can easily help you in the auditing process by helping you check the engagement, reach on many platforms right from a single dashboard.
They can also help you suggest the right time and right hashtags to use to get more engagement on your posts. You can use the following tools for scheduling
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Tailwind, etc
3.Social Mentions:
For advanced audits, you need to find out what people are talking about your brand on social media platforms. A tool like Mention can help you find these things and measure the number of mentions on social media.
Steps To Perform A Social Media Audit:
1.Preparing A Spread Sheet For Audit:
Spread Sheets are easy to use to make a note of various things and metrics of the content shared on the social media platforms so that you can analyze them and make data-driven decisions.
My recommendation for you is to create a new Google Sheet as you can access it easily online. This way it would be easy to read or edit the things in the sheet. Moreover, you can create a copy of it to use it as a template for other brand’s social media audits in the future.
After the creation of a sheet name it by considering the brand name and date so that it would be easy to access the data of a particular month whenever needed to compare the performance easily.
But to have the things separate avoiding any confusion it is better to create a new tab in the sheet for each platform as the key performance indicators are different on each platform.
Add the following columns in each platform-specific tab with the most important things such as
- Social Profile Name And Link To That
- Responsible Person For Each Social media handle
- Platform-specific Key Performance Indicators
- Top-performing posts
2.Analyzing Each Profile and Making a Note of the Metrics:
i.Facebook: Facebook provides a lot of tools for business pages. You can check various important metrics such as engagement, reach, followers, etc from the insights section of your page.
Moreover, you can check the demographics such as their gender, location, etc. This way you can understand what type of content is driving more engagement or reach. Now identify the most shared or engaged content and list it in the spreadsheet.
Checking these aspects you can plan a content strategy that can effectively improve the engagement on your page and gain more followers. You can even check the demographics from the people tab to understand various things related to your followers such as their age, gender, location, etc.
This way you can estimate whether you are reaching the right people or not with your content on social media.
ii.Instagram: Instagram started as a photo-sharing platform now can be used to share awesome stories and videos on IGTV.
Check whether the Instagram account is switched to a business profile or not. Business accounts get access to the Instagram insights where you can check the demographics of the followers, profile views, engagement, etc. See what type of photos shared on the profile are getting the most likes or comments.
Check the hashtags added in the captions as they play a major role in helping your content reach more people on Instagram. Check the bio content if it is aligned with your brand and the most important link such as a campaign link or landing pages is placed there.
Also, track the number of link clicks in the bio of the Instagram handle. Instagram stories can help a lot as well. So check their performance as well if there are any stories uploaded in the past and make a note of the hashtags added in the top-performing stories.
iii.Pinterest: Pinterest is a special platform where many users find the infographics either by search or suggested by the platform. As in the case of Instagram you need to switch to the business profile to gain access to the insights.
You can easily check what posts are getting more saves, clicks, etc digging deeper in the analytics. Checking the interests tab you can easily understand what are the topics in which your audience is interested in so that you can create the infographics around them related to the business.
3.Setup New Objectives: Now as you have already made a note of various things you need to analyze the data. For example, as suggested to list the top-performing posts, then you need to check the type of content(video or image), hashtags used (especially important for Instagram), etc.
Also, see which channel is driving more leads or traffic to your business website. For example, if a specific platform is delivering more leads for your business then there is a higher chance to increase it further by focusing more on creating content on that platform.
This way by performing a social media audit you can plan the social media content strategy so that you can improve the key performance indicators and achieve the goals of your business.
Conclusion: The audit might look a bit tough initially but performing Social Media Audits on a regular basis can help in analyzing the behavior of the audience or followers of your brand.
It helps in Social Content Planning so that the posts or content shared on social media drive more engagement or clicks. This way a brand can get more ROI out of the social media marketing efforts.