As a social media marketer, you need to constantly get updated with the newest trends and practices. In this present world, when social media is constantly evolving, you need to be prepared to always expect new platforms, audiences, and features to emerge. As there are an array of new ways to utilize social media for your business, as a business owner or marketer, it is also important for you to make the best use of social platforms as a marketing and advertising tool.
However, there are proper ways to utilize the countless blessings and tactics of social media. And it is not something you can do just out of the blue, rather proper auditing or measuring is required in this case. Because this is pretty much essential for tracking what’s working for your social media and what’s not. And this is where you need to take a deeper look at our detailed guide to social media audit!
What Do You Mean by Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is able to provide you with a full view of how the social media is working for your business. With a social media audit, you have to follow the process of reviewing certain metrics so that you can clearly evaluate your social media strategy that is effective at present. The metrics that you need to review include the information about audience demographics, engagement, locations, the overall campaign performance, and many more.
Impressions, comments, likes, shares, and other interactions can be included in a social media audit. Moreover, you can get a clear picture about which of your posts are getting the most engagement and from what audience base you are getting this. With all of this data, you can find all the necessary information that you can use to make social media more effective for your business.
Why is A Social Media Audit Important?
If you are wondering – “What is the purpose of performing a social media audit?”, you should know that this audit is very much helpful for you to review how your social media efforts can be tracked against your actual business goal.
Moreover, a social media audit is able to show you which of your contents and platforms are performing their best, who your most engaged audiences are and what they care about. Through this data, you can determine where you can focus your efforts next.
How to Perform A Social Media Audit?
When you consider doing your social media audit, you need to remember that it is not mandatory to start everything from scratch. There are plenty of templates or examples that can help you to get you started. You need to gather adequate information and perform some in-depth analysis.
Take a tour below where we will cover the necessary steps required for building a social media audit.
Just follow these required steps:
- List all of your social accounts
- Analyze your branding engagement
- Identify the pattern of your top-performing content
- Assess the social channels’ performance
- Understand your audience base for each platform
- Take required action and set new goals for business
Now let us dive deeper into the discussion of how you can perform social media audits with these simple steps.
1. List all of your social media accounts
At the beginning of the social media audit, it is important for you to round up all of the social media profiles that your business is currently having. Consider including the ones as well which have been inactive for a while. Consider recording your username or handling the URL for each social media platform, the number of followers or subscribers, the engagement metrics, or any other KPIs that might be relevant for those channels.
2. Analyze your branding’s engagement
Next, you need to analyze each of the profile’s engagement that your business has. For this, you can use the built-in analytics features that the social media platforms have. This feature will provide a lot of meaningful information. Record the engagement metrics, demographic information, top posts, the impressions and reach for each of your social platforms. By this way, you can find out each platform’s strengths and weaknesses for your business.
3. Identify the pattern of your top-performing content
When you have a record of your top-performing posts for each of your social platforms, carefully analyze for any similarities. For this, you can look through the popular posts within each platform and take a look across all the platforms which things have in common. These things can refer to the type of post, the target audience of the post, the posting time, etc.
By looking at the collected data, you can be able to see the pattern in how your audience gets engaged with your business. You will also get to know the followings –
- Which platform is generating the most traffic to your website?
- Where are you getting the highest levels of engagement?
- What demographic is the most commonly engaging one? With which types of content they are getting engaged the most?
So these are all the patterns for your top-performing content.
Recommended reading: How to develop Social Media content strategy
4. Assess the social channels’ performance
Now you have to assess your social channels’ performance to set effective goals for your social channel. By determining the state of each of your social media profiles, you need to decide what you want to improve. Moreover, do not forget to consider what is already going well for you to capitalize on. And all of these goals should go beyond just increasing a follower base for your channels. Because, the social media channel goals should prioritize the benefit of the business, increased brand awareness, more engagement and traffic to your channels.
5. Understand your audience base for each platform
Social media audit largely helps the businesses to understand the audience bases for the social platforms. And when you determine this, you can make a plan accordingly to succeed in accomplishing your targets.
6. Take required action and set new goals for business
Your business should use the opportunity to utilize the strength of other resources along with your social platforms. So as per the outcomes of your social audit, you can find out the potentiality of your business and explore new options for taking required options and setting new goals for your business.
So after completing all of these steps, you can effectively prepare a social media audit report for your business and use that as the base for bringing changes gradually.
What Does A Social Media Audit Template Include?
The typical social media audits include a few basic elements. These can be –
- Sections to display audience demographics
- Your recent most successful social posts
- The performance of ad campaigns etc.
The good news is that there are so many popular resources – like Hootsuite, SocialBee, HubSpot etc. – from where you get the social media audit templates for your inspiration and as per your needs.
What Are Some Social Media Audit Tools?
You need to consider using the right tool to complete your social media audit to make the overall process faster and easier. There are many tools that will give you extensive analytics offering the insights on more than each individual platform’s built-in capabilities. You can check out the tools below and see which one of them might work for your business:
- Sprout Social: An all-in-one social media management platform that provides an in-depth view of how the audiences basically interact with your social media profiles.
- HootSuite: This tool will create custom reports for your business to exactly show how social media is impacting your brand.
- Unmetric: This platform can help you compare, benchmark, and analyze your business’ social performance.
- Zoho Social: The monitoring feature of this tool provides you with multiple “listening” columns that update any engagement in real time that happens with your social media profiles.
- Sociality.io: This tool will help you get the full picture of the platforms of your social media competitors and you will know how your audience is engaging with your industry online.
How Much Does a Social Media Audit Cost?
The cost of a social media audit can vary depending on several factors such as the complexity of the audit, the size of the organization, and the level of expertise of the auditor. Social media audit costs vary based on organization size and audit complexity, ranging from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, with potential benefits worth the investment.
However, it is important to note that a social media audit can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your social media strategy and can ultimately save you money by identifying areas for improvement and optimizing your social media marketing efforts.
Is It Good to Have A Social Media Audit Checklist?
It is important to stay on track when you start with your social media audit. If you maintain a simple checklist at that time, it will help you focus on what you need to accomplish. So always keep the following ones in your social media audit checklist –
- List down all of your social media accounts into one spreadsheet.
- Use a social media audit template and consider having a guide so you know where to start.
- Use the right social media audit tool that will save you time and resources during the process.
- Monitor the key metrics and focus on finding data on audience, engagement, and post information for the platforms that your business uses.
- Set your goals for defining what you want to improve about your social media presence.
Is It Necessary to Conduct a Social Media Audit?
Conducting a social media audit is necessary to evaluate the advantage of your social media strategy. It provides insights into your audience engagement, content strategy, and overall performance, helping you identify areas for improvement and optimize your social media marketing efforts. A social media audit is essential for maintaining a relevant, engaging, and competitive social media presence.
What are the Benefits of Social Media Audit?
A social media audit can certainly help you determine how you can best utilize your efforts and resources. If you also do a quarterly audit of your online presence, this will ultimately help your business get the most out of your social media. Some other core benefits are mentioned as follows –
- Social media audit keeps your social media strategy relevant
- Helps you do effective planning for your business
- Builds up your social presence effectively
- Strongly communicates your brand personality
- Helps you understand your audience
- Developing better relationships with your target & potential audience base
- Helps you utilize the most out of your social media
- Saves time and effort
Final Remarks
Now that you know the importance of social media audit for your business, it is essential that you keep all the things mentioned in this article in mind sincerely. In any case after reading this article, if you are thinking of how you can manage and monitor your social media campaigns, read the article in detail.
Bonus-part: