Suppose you consider social media marketing an integral part of your marketing plan (which is what it must be). In that case, you need to be aware of the best practices to regularly audit your social media.
But, most businesses don’t spend the time and effort to conduct a social audit. Ultimately, they will end up drowning in excess time, money, and workers.
To ensure that you don’t use your social media accounts using inadequate strategies, we’ve provided a step-by-step procedure for conducting an effective social media audit.
Wait! We’ve also developed an online auditing template for social media to help you understand the auditing process hands-on. Let’s go.
What Is an Audit of Social Media?
Social media audits are an assessment of your social media accounts, which evaluates the effectiveness of your goals for marketing. It highlights your strengths and weaknesses and the subsequent actions to boost your performance.
1. Round up All Your Social Profiles
Start by rounding up each active social media profile under your/client’s name, and then include it on the spreadsheet. It may seem trivial; obviously, you have every one of your social media accounts. Sure, you have, but you still need to do the practice to ensure that you don’t forget the profiles that you created years ago and then forgot about.
Additionally, you could experience the shock of discovering unofficial accounts for your brand created by fakes or affiliates. Find them and have them shut down.
The goal is to keep one central list of all your social media profiles in one place to keep track of and investigate new opportunities or ones that aren’t being explored across any platform. Now, extend your fingers and begin looking up your brand’s name on Google and every other social media platform.
2. Review Each Account for the Authenticity of the Brand
Check each profile to ensure they’re in line with the current brand’s style guidelines. That includes profile, banner images, hashtags, copy, phrases, your brand’s voice URLs, and many more.
Here are the main areas to be analyzed for each social profile:
Cover and profile photos: Ensure your images reflect your brand’s current image and conform to the social media’s image size specifications.
Profile/bio text: There is a limited amount of space to use when writing an online bio for social media. It’s crucial to get the most out of it. Are all fields correctly filled in? Does the content within the “about” section match your tone and guidelines for voice?
Username: Do you have the same user name across different social media channels? It’s a good idea to do so if you can. Of course, you could have multiple accounts for each network if they have different functions. (For instance, Twitter has two accounts are @Hootsuite as well as @Hootsuite_Help.)
Verification: Are you able to verify your account with a blue checkmark badge? If not, do you want to consider trying? We’ve got guides on how to be certified through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, should this be something you’d like to explore.
3. Identify Your Top-performing Social Media Content
For each profile, make a list of your most popular five posts. Copy the link to the posts into your template for auditing social media so you can quickly look them up later.
What is a “top-performing post?” We recommend ranking them based on engagement rates to determine the posts your target audience is most comfortable with. You may also select a crucial alternative measure to focus on, such as clicks to link or conversions.
4. Keep an Eye on Your Current Social Media Communities
Check out the demographics of social media in your current communities. Facebook particularly offers a wealth of information here. Examine this regularly to see if it has changed.
Take a close look at your following. Your audience that is engaged, what’s the difference? LinkedIn provides excellent demo data on your target audience.
Is your content matching with the people following you on every platform? Take a look at geo-locations and age groups as well as on LinkedIn things such as seniority.
5. What Posts on Social Media Are Making Waves and Which Aren’t?
Which content is performing the best in terms of total interactions Comments only? Shares only? This is an essential aspect of the overall audit. Take a close look at the kinds of content used for each of these.
For instance, how does promotional content perform in comparison to? More focused on education? Look at the format, too. What is the performance of photo posts in comparison to? Videos?
6. Monitor Your Social Media Review Results Over Time
Conducting this audit is fantastic, but the key to making it efficient? Conducting audits on social media every few weeks and then reviewing the results in time.
Consistency isn’t glamorous, but it’s effective. Choose the time frame for an audit. Do you want to do it monthly? Quarterly? Keep it up, and check your social media metrics and analysis of the previous period every time you make a change.
As time passes, this will allow you to eliminate the things that aren’t working, focus on what’s working, and detect unusual patterns or problems quickly.
7. Channel Setup
YouTube marketers tend to overlook how important it is to audit the channel’s setup. Many of them think that it may be easier to buy monetized YouTube channels rather than organize their own channels. But if you’ve got a large YouTube channel with a lot of content, you must organize them into playlists, categories, and sections.
Also, look over the About section of your profile and determine what messages it contains.
We frequently fail to refresh this information, so it has remained the same over the years as our brand’s strategy shifts several times. If the information in the About section of your website doesn’t make sense for your brand, you can change it immediately as per your guidelines for your brand.
8. Broken Links
A few of your videos might have been blocked by YouTube, or you may have deliberately deleted them. This could lead to broken links. When you are auditing the performance of your YouTube channel, verify that the hyperlinks included in the descriptions are current and active.
You must perform it by hand. If you notice broken links, you can replace them with the most recent and pertinent videos.
Conclusion
Social media profiles of your clients or brand cannot flourish without a well-designed data-based strategy. Conducting a social media audit puts you deep into the data that affects social growth.
Following the steps mentioned in this article, you’ll be able to accurately analyze your various social channels and create an effective social media presence.
Keep in mind that an audit isn’t an event that happens once. It is crucial to check your social performance regularly to discover new opportunities and challenges.
