Are you aware of a social media audit? If not, then in this blog you’ll get to know all about social media audit and why it is important. Many businesses these days are using social media to promote their business. They need to build a strong social media strategy to successfully market their products and services. Businesses that are using social media also need to understand the importance of social media audits and the right way to perform the audit. Many professional companies offer social media optimization services including a complete social media audit. Businesses can use these services to evaluate and optimize their social media profiles and strategies.
Importance of social media audit
A social media audit is one of the most important parts of developing or updating an effective social media marketing plan. By performing social media audits, businesses can enhance their online presence. Completing an audit of your social media accounts helps you understand what’s going on in each network. It helps you to determine:
- What’s working best and what’s not.
- Are there any outdated profiles? If yes, them which outdated profiles do you need to revive, repurpose, or shut down
- Are there any impostor accounts that are stealing your fans?
- New opportunities to develop and engage your audience
- Marketing techniques are positively hitting established goals versus which ones need to be revised
Social media audit also helps businesses to find out any online profiles that are not in line with a business’s marketing plan. The audit can help realign those profiles or indicate they need to be disposed of. The results achieved from the social media audit can be used for planning future campaigns and completing future audits.
What should be included in a social media audit?
Here are some of the key things that businesses must include while performing a social media audit.
- Review and analyze the branding of your social media accounts: First and foremost, it is vital to determine whether your branding is consistent. Also, see to it that all your profile pics should be consistent, you are using consistent language, banner images across all your social media profiles are matching, and the ‘about us’ section is well updated.
- Review and analyze your brand social media metrics: Make sure to review and analyze your key brand social media metrics that include brand posting, reach and engagement metrics, traffic driving from social to your website, and the number of leads you are driving from social media. For optimal review and analysis of your social media metrics, you can go back a minimum of 3-6 months to get the real data.
- Review social demographic info: A social media audit must include reviewing the social demographic info of your existing communities. Review data available about your audience on various social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn to determine whether your content is matching up with who is following you on each platform. When reviewing the data, focus on age ranges, interests, geographies, etc.
- Review your social media content: Reviewing social media content is one of the most important parts of the entire audit. Review your 3 to 6 months old content, break it down by month, and then by post. Check for peaks and valleys, as well as trends among content, which is driving more awareness and engagement than others. Find out which content is performing best in terms of total engagements, comments, shares, etc.
- Review the social media activities of your competitors: Review the social media activities of your competitors to determine how your company stacks up against the competition in terms of engagement per post. Check how many times your competitors are posting on each network, how big are their social media communities, what type of content is working perfectly for them, and what is not along with their content themes and formats.
- Review your leaders and employees on social media: Review your leaders and employees on social media to find out what networks they are most active on. It could be LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram. Check whether your leader’s profiles are complete or not and how you could optimize them. Review what types of content they are sharing and in which formats and content themes. Also, what results are they getting by sharing the company’s posts and organic pics.
- Find out what’s trending in the industry: Find out what hashtags are mostly used in the particular industry. Know-how about what’s trending in the industry will help you better promotion of your social media posts. Also, check who is your major influencers to know the exact issues that your customers care about.
So, these are some of the key things that a company must look at when conducting its social media audits. You can include other things as well in your audit as per your key requirements. Though it seems a time-consuming task, the results can be very beneficial. If you are unable to conduct the audit, you can consider hiring a professional company offering social media optimization services that can perform social media audit for you.