Do you want the efficiency of your social media pages to be improved? Are you interested in exploring new ways to help you to expand your audience? A social media audit is a perfect way to analyse the channels of your social media and get actionable feedback to help move your messaging forward. We will guide you through the steps you need in this article to perform your own social media.
Locate your existing social media profiles
The first step to take is to find all the social media accounts of your company, which could sound straightforward, but there are lots of other social networks where your business may be identified with so many different platforms outside of the big four of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Be sure to watch out for both official and unofficial profiles.
One of the best ways to locate accounts is to check on multiple sites for your business name to see what pops up. When you find profiles, make a list of these and those affiliated with your company, making sure to use your favourite spreadsheet to take care of the following things: Social media platform.
- Profile URL
- Profile Name
- Profile Description
- Number of followers, fans etc
- Date of last post or activity
- Frequency of activity
Check for profile completion and consistency
The next move is to check that all of your social media accounts are how complete they are between the various channels. Consistent branding through the multiple networks is what you are searching for, as is the details for explanations and links to your website and other sites. Create a list of all the spreadsheet anomalies to help find profiles that need to be identified.
Work out which profiles you need
Now that you know the location of each of your social media profiles and know how many followers each of these has, you can start to work out which networks your business needs to keep active. Some of the ways to work this out are to ask yourselves a few simple questions:
- Why are we using this network?
- Is our target audience using it?
- What goals will it help us achieve?
- Why do we want to use it?
Measure growth and performance
When you have identified the social profiles that you want to keep it is important to start to measure how they are performing and how they have grown over time. Depending on what your goals are will determine which metrics to measure and analyse. Some of the most common ones to look at in order to measure growth include:
- Total followers or fans – Facebook and Twitter both have analytics platforms that make it easy to view growth over time.
- Posting frequency – How often do you post on each platform and is there any correlation between post frequency and follower growth
- Engagement metrics – There are plenty of engagement metrics available on the majority of platforms from number of likes, shares and comments, to clicks on your website and other key metrics.
In addition to the above, don’t forget to check performance metrics using tools such as Google Analytics to see the impact of social media on your conversion rates and other important business goals.
Examine your competitors
Take a look at the social profiles of your competitors as well as any niche influencers or big brands in your sector in order to get ideas on steps you can take to improve your own accounts. Start off by looking at a handful of these accounts and carry out a similar audit on their profiles. Some of the things to look out for include:
- Branding – What are they doing to promote their brand? Is their brand image consistent? Do they use imagery effectively?
- Engagement and popularity – How many followers do they have? How much engagement do their posts receive? Are they using advertising to generate engagement or is this organic?
- Types of post – Which post types are most effective for them? What type of posts do they use? What level of engagement do they get for each post type?
Work out what goals you want to achieve
It can be tempting to start posting new and fresh content based on what your competitors are doing but before diving in to do this you should look at what business goals you are looking to achieve. Before doing anything put together a plan of action and set up specific goals for each of your social platforms that tie in with your wider business goals.
What works well on Facebook may not have the same impact on Instagram and an article that you post on LinkedIn may not do as well when shared on Twitter. It is important to test different post types on each network to find out which drives the best engagement for your business.
