How to conduct a social media audit

A social media audit is vital to building a solid foundation for your social media marketing. It allows you to determine what is working and more importantly, what isn’t.

Take a quick audit your profiles to improve your social media marketing in these five steps:

Step 1: Look for discrepancies

As a first step, I would recommend reviewing all your basic information on your social media profiles. Do all the links work? Are your hours accurate? Have you filled out all of the information in the about profile?

You want your social media profiles to align as much as possible. This includes the about section and your social handles.

A social media handle is the name that follows the @ sign. If your Twitter handle is @DogWalkingBiz then your Facebook handle should not be @DurhamDogWalker. This is not only inconsistent branding, but it is confusing to an outside viewer. It will also make it harder for someone to find you in a search.

The same goes for the about or overview section. In one to two sentences a reader should know exactly who you are, where you are located and what value your business can provide. People are busy so get right to the point!

Step 2: Read your audience insights

Facebook offers a robust amount of data on your page’s audience. It’s very useful in understanding who you are talking to. However, this is only provided for a Facebook business page and not a personal profile.

Go under your “Insights” tab and spend some time reading through the data. Facebook provides demographic information, location, when your audience is online and more. These are key pieces of information to know not only who you are talking to, but also when is the best time to reach them.

In addition to Facebook, Instagram has similar data for anyone with a business account. LinkedIn will provide a little bit of high-level information including where your followers are located and the top job functions. For Twitter you have to go to Analytics.twitter.com and look under the “Audiences” tab. Twitter shares great qualitative information such as lifestyle type and consumer behavior.

If you combine the audience insights from all of the platforms, you can paint a fairly cohesive picture of your audience…for free!

Step 3: Research your competition

In the same insights tab, Facebook and LinkedIn share “companies to track.” These are pages pinged as similar to yours. They’ll share total followers, number of new followers and even engagement rate. This is great to see how you are tracking in comparison to your competition.

Once you have determined a few competitors, I would recommend looking at the type of content your competition is posting and see if you can snag a few new idea.

Step 4: Review your best and worst posts

Now that you know more about your audience and your competition, it’s time to look at your current social media efforts.

The analytics sections of each platform will provide data on each social media post. Beware that some of the platforms only share data up to three months back so you’ll need to keep track in a separate excel sheet if you choose to not purchase a third-party analytics software.

I would recommend looking at your content from the past one to three months. Then make a list of which posts performed the worst and which the best.

There are a few ways you could categorize this. Depending on what metrics matter to you, you could rank posts by total engagement (likes, shares, comments). You could also rank posts by the lowest and highest reach or lowest and highest post clicks. Or all of the above.

Spending time reviewing your content is so important because it’ll tell you if your audience is finding value in what you are posting. Then post more of what is resonating and less of what isn’t. Pretty simple right?

Step 5: Search for insights

You took the time and made a list of your best and worst engagement posts. Now what?

Look for insights.

By this I mean are there any commonalities to the posts that performed the worst and those that performed the best. Maybe every single best post had a picture and the worst didn’t. Perhaps four out of five of your worst posts were about a giveaway or you posted them before lunchtime. What can you take away from the data?

Social media audits are important to laying a solid foundation to build your social media strategy.

Want help with a social media audit or simply want to talk more about it? Let’s chat!