A social media audit refers to the process of tracking and assessing all your social media content. Auditing your social profiles helps you understand whether your social media efforts are working. Once you know this, you can craft strategies to optimize your social media platforms for marketing.
According to Statista, brands and companies are implementing social media strategies into their digital marketing campaigns for more awareness, increased exposure, and improved sales. As a brand on social media, regular audits will help you ensure that you are not merely creating posts and jumping on social media trends without getting any tangible results.
After all, ultimately, the goal is to drive conversions for your brand or business.
In this blog post, we share with you the key steps to performing a social media audit. Let’s dive in!
1. Check key metrics of each social media platform
Analyzing the key metrics on your social media platforms will reveal how they contribute to your overall ROI. The aim is to determine which platforms you should channel more effort to. It’s advisable to focus on the social media channels that are effectively contributing to your brand’s goals.
Some important social media metrics you should look out for include:
- Engagement metrics: include post-engagement rates and the number of comments, shares, and more.
- Awareness metrics: include your impressions and reach. Impressions refer to how many times your posts or ads appear in user feeds. Meanwhile, reach mentions how many people view your posts.
- Share of voice (SOV) metric: refers to how many people talk about your product or service compared to your competitors. For example, if you have a London-based tech company, SOV metrics measure the number of users mentioning your brand through the formula “@[your brand]” on Twitter.
- Customer service metrics: include response time and rate, which measure how fast you reply to user comments or handle complaints.
- ROI metrics: include referrals and conversions. Referrals mention how users land on your website, for example, through influencer marketing. Meanwhile, conversions relate to how users access your website through social platforms and make a purchase.
To better visualize the impact of social networks on your success, you can use free social media audit templates available on the Internet or tailor one based on your needs. Below is an example of how the audit template is used to measure social media performance:
While various platforms provide different metrics you can assess, it doesn’t mean you must include all of them in the audit. Instead, focus on metrics that are more aligned with your business goals. We’ll talk more about this later.
2. Identify top-performing channel in terms of traffic
Just like we saw in our post on social media accounting, you can use different social media channels to attract visitors to your product or service. But not all of them give the best results. For this reason, you need to look out for traffic generated by each channel when you run an audit. This can help you determine which platforms to focus your marketing efforts on.
It’s easy to find traffic data for any social media in Google Analytics. All you need to do is click on Acquisition > Social on the analytics dashboard.
Also, social media audit tools like eClincher can dive deeper into your top performing channels in terms of traffic.
Beyond looking out for how many visitors your social profiles generate, you need to check the type of traffic coming from your various social channels. Which social platforms bring high-converting leads?
For instance, if you use Instagram and LinkedIn, you may discover that the visitors from LinkedIn that buy your products are more than those from Instagram. With this data, you’ll know that you should focus your lead generation efforts on LinkedIn. You’ll also know what platform to focus on when you build your social media brand.
You should also identify which types of content generate traffic on these platforms. Doing this will help you align your posts so that you can get more results from them.
3. Focus on platform goals
When performing your social media audit, you should be clear about why you created these accounts in the first place. Ask yourself what you expected from each platform. Ultimately, in your social media audit, you want to see if the platforms are reaching these goals and key performance indicators. So if they aren’t reaching them, you can craft strategies to improve their performance.
Typically, your platform goals will fall between one or more of these goals below:
- increase website traffic
- improve brand awareness
- grow community engagement
- reach new audiences
- attract more leads and sales
Your KPIs will depend on those goals. So, if your goal was to grow community engagement, you’ll want to look out for KPIs such as comments, shares, and likes. If the goal was to reach new audiences, then you’ll be looking out for metrics like follower growth.
But wait. How do you use this data to improve your social media platform’s performance? Let me illustrate. Say you create a pillar page on “organic products” and share content on Facebook. Your goal is to increase traffic by 100% within six months. If the result is lower than 100% (the platform doesn’t meet the set KPI), you need to learn the reasons behind this failure and create a strategy to improve traffic. You might want to run Facebook ads, for example.
You can track your goals using the insights provided by each social media network, but it may be inconvenient to go back and forth between different channels.
Instead, you can use a social media management tool like eClincher which gathers all social media profiles in one box and uses graphs to visualize data.
4. Know your audience better
When running a social media account, it’s important for you to understand your audience. Where are they located? What gender makes up most of your followers? What is their age group? Once you answer these questions, you can determine how you should run your social media campaigns.
You can get this audience information from the social media platforms themselves. Instagram’s Audience Insights, for instance, shows you the gender, age range, and top location of your followers.
Your audience insight should play an important role in directing your social media strategy.
With the data from your audit, you may, for instance, determine what your audience enjoys and create the type of content they engage with the most. This can help optimize and improve your social media performance.
You can complement your findings with polls on these platforms to find out what your audience wants to see more often.
5. Create data-backed strategy
Once you have all your data, it’s time for an informed action plan. The idea behind a social media audit is to understand your existing strengths and setbacks. In my opinion, Nike is the best brand on social media, so it’s worth checking out their site.
The data from a social media audit helps you answer some crucial questions like: Which factors broaden your audience on certain platforms? Or what needs adjusting about your use of social media (e.g., posting frequency or content length)?
When you know where you currently stand, you can make data-based plans to improve your social media presence and performance. Depending on data analytics and goals, you can also build different strategies in the short or long term. These are what you should include in your action plan.
So, let’s say you find that LinkedIn brings in the most traffic to your website, your audience is composed of young professionals, and they access their LinkedIn on weekends. Your plan can include the following action items:
- Run LinkedIn ads for X period.
- Increase LinkedIn posts by Y on weekends.
- Use friendly and casual language in posts.
After tailoring your strategy, you can manage your social media performance using tools for automated posting, monitoring hashtags, and more to make the job easier for you.
You can do everything from posting content to tracking metrics in one place. With the tools, you can automate specific tasks, too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is the process of reviewing and assessing a company’s social media presence and activity. This includes evaluating things like the number of followers, engagement levels, and content strategy. An effective social media audit will help a company identify areas where they could be doing better, as well as highlight any successes they may have had.
Why is social media audit necessary?
A social media audit is necessary to help businesses understand the full scope of their social media presence and identify opportunities for improvement. It can also help to track progress and measure success over time.
What are the social media audit tools?
There are a number of social media audit tools available, but one of the most popular is eclincher. It’s a comprehensive platform that lets you manage all your social media accounts in one place, and it includes a range of features for audits, such as detailed reporting and analysis, as well as scheduling and publishing tools.
Nailing the social media marketing game
A social media audit should be an agile process. This means you shouldn’t just perform the audit once. Instead, examine all social media sites at regular intervals. The audit frequency (e.g., monthly or quarterly) can depend on your objectives. Regular audits allow you to grasp your competitive edge compared to other rivals.
No matter how often you audit your social media, you should stick to these key steps:
- Evaluate core metrics for each social media platform
- Determine high-traffic social channels
- Check main goals of each platform
- Know your audience better
- Build a data-backed action plan
Also, don’t ignore management tools when auditing social media sites and checking your strategy. These tools have built-in features like impressions or content-curated feeds.They allow you to closely observe content performance.
Choosing the right tools such as eClincher will help your brand increase traffic and raise brand awareness online. Get started on your social media audit and you’ll reap the best results.
