A social media audit sounds like a hard-to-understand process with lots of numbers and data, right? It doesn’t have to be as hard as it sounds, though. You can see it as a way to organize your social media accounts and make sure they help your business.
A social media audit’s most basic job is to find the channels that work for your audience and change or get rid of the ones that don’t help your business grow.
You don’t know where to begin with your social media audit? Follow the steps below to learn how to do it right.
The first step of a social media audit is to look at your social media profiles and see what they say. You can’t do a technical SEO audit without knowing what a site is about. In the same way, you can’t do a social media audit without knowing what your profiles are.
So start by making a list of all your company’s social media profiles and accounts, whether they are still active or have been forgotten. That helps you choose which profiles to check. It also helps you find and close social accounts that don’t belong to you.
Find the email address and user name that were used when each profile was created. For each social profile, write down the password, the number of followers, the level of engagement, and the reach. Then make sure your brand stays the same.
Making sure that your social media profiles have the same structure, voice, and style helps your target audience trust you. So, they are a very important part of the social media audit.
Here are some general questions you can ask each social media account during your audit to see if they are all the same:
- Do you have a new cover photo or profile picture?
- Are your usernames consistent?
- Are the posts you’ve pinned still useful?
- Are the links to the right websites or landing pages that work?
- Aliexpress profiles are good choices if you want to find social media profiles to copy.
It’s easy to find their social media profiles on AliExpress. As you can see from the Instagram and Twitter profiles shown above, they both use the logo as their profile picture, have similar bios, and are verified.
The posts on their social media profiles also have the same casual voice and tone. All of the social media profiles will then be in sync.
Goals should be set for each platform.
The next step is to set goals. This comes after you’ve done an analysis of social media and decided which platforms you’ll be auditing. You’ll know what to look for in your social media audit based on your goals.
The audit will give you many insights and analytics about social media, but which ones should you care about? If you make SMART goals for each social media platform, it’s easy to find key metrics that will help you.
One of your goals could be to get more people to know about your brand through your Instagram account in a certain amount of time. With this goal, you know you’ll need to look at your social media profiles’ follower growth and engagement rates.
If each social media account is used for something different, you should set goals and strategies for each one. So, if you want to use Facebook to grow your list of subscribers, you can add an email finder to your profile to help you find and collect email addresses.
Check the most important numbers for each profile.
After you set your social media audit goals, you should check your key metrics. With the help of data and analytics, the metrics help you figure out if your current strategies are working as planned in the goals.
Your metrics should be tailored to the goals of each social media profile, so it’s easy to know what to look for. For example, if your goal is to get more people to interact with you on Instagram, your key social media metrics could be the number of new followers, likes, and shares.
In your social media audit, you can use different kinds of metrics. Here are a few of the most common:
- Conversion metrics that show how engaged a profile is
- Consumer metrics are ways to find out what people think of a brand.
- Awareness metrics that show who the audience is now and who it could be.
- You can track the metrics with tools from outside the social media site or with tools built into the social media site itself. The second gives you more relevant and detailed information about your performance. Here is an example of a thought that Meta had.
Meta Facebook and Instagram insights make it easier to check important metrics like page reach and conversions because they collect and process the data. The insights are also shown in graphs, which makes it easier to keep track of and compare different metrics.
Check out your best posts.
What kinds of content are people interested in? Find your most popular posts is the best way to answer this question. You need to look at your analytics again and look at more than just the number of likes.
Make a list of the posts that did the best and look at them to see if there are any patterns. Find out what kinds of content there are and go the extra mile to learn more. Is there a common theme? How interested were the people in the audience? How many likes and views do you have? How did you use hash tags?
You can also compare it to the content that did the worst so you can see the main differences and figure out what your audience likes best. With this information, it’s easy to come up with better plans.
For example, if you see that your Instagram followers like reels more than stills, you should add more reels to your social media plan. You can also use tools like a sentence rewriter to give your copy for the posts that don’t do as well a little more punch.
Find out which platform brings you the most visitors.
Most businesses that have an online presence want to bring people back to their website. So, the most important thing to look at is how much traffic each social platform brings.
During your social media audit, you should figure out how much each profile affects your website. Find out which profile or channel brings in the most leads or has the highest conversion rate. This helps you figure out which channels are best for your brand. It also helps you find important patterns that you can use to make better plans for social media in the future.
There are tools and platforms that can help you with this.
Google Analytics gives you data that shows how much traffic you get from each social media channel, how engaged people are with you, and how many people just visit your site and leave right away. As the example above shows, you can see at a glance how well each channel is doing.
Check out the new platforms.
You don’t have to use every social media site, but you shouldn’t miss out on anything either. So, if your social media audit shows gaps, you should fill them in on your content calendar.
By adding a competitor analysis to your audit process, you can find out what platforms your competitors are using that you haven’t joined yet. For example, you might realize that by not being on TikTok, you are missing out on a bigger group of Gen Z people.
Make sure you have a plan for how to use the new social media platforms. The best part is that you don’t have to stay on a channel that doesn’t work. But to find out, you have to give it a try first.
You can decide if you want to keep your accounts on the new platforms or not based on the audit process and real data. If you’re not sure if you want to join the channel right away, reserve the usernames and social media handles you want.
Create a Plan
Once you’ve finished your social media audit, it’s time to figure out how to make your social media presence and content strategy work better. You should make a good plan.
Your plan will need new, well-thought-out social media strategies and goals that cover the areas that need work. One of your goals might be to finally sign up for TikTok and get X number of followers.
Last, make a plan for how you will do your future social media audits. By doing social media audits, you can look at your social media goals and make any changes that will help your company more. They should be done every three months.
In the end
To get the most out of your social media presence, you need to do regular social media audits.
Start by looking at your social media profiles, figuring out the goals of each platform, and making key metrics for each. Next, figure out which of your posts and social media platforms get the most traffic. Then, think about new platforms and come up with a better plan for social media.
With a good social media audit, you’ll know where you stand on social media, which will help you come up with better ways to use social media.
Best wishes!
Owen Baker is in charge of content marketing for Voila Norbert, an online tool for checking email addresses. He has spent most of the last 10 years working online for a variety of marketing companies. When he isn’t writing, you can find him trying out new recipes in the kitchen.