In this Revenue Weekly ? video, Jess explains how to perform a social media audit so you can maximize your social media growth.

https://youtu.be/fs9RQ4Czl-w

Transcript:

A social media audit is an analysis of how well your social media marketing strategy is working.

It looks at things like followers and engagements to determine what you’re doing well and what parts of your strategy need some TLC.

Wondering how often you should perform a social media audit? There’s not really one answer.

If you’re just getting started with social media or testing out a new strategy, performing social media audits more frequently might be necessary to keep track of your accounts.

If you’re more established on social platforms, you might be able to audit social media channels less frequently, like quarterly or yearly.

Your audit frequency depends on your needs, and if you’re working with a social media marketer or an agency, you can definitely discuss this when putting together your strategy.

Great…now let’s move on to how to perform a social media audit. Here’s step one.

Step 1. Make a spreadsheet to track your social metrics

You can’t go wrong with a spreadsheet for your social media audit.

I’m not going to tell you how to structure your spreadsheet.

You might want to make separate tabs for each channel, or if you only use one or two channels, you may want to keep everything in one area.

That’s up to you.

Just keep in mind you might add or remove channels as your business adapts to the ever-changing social media landscape, so you’ll want a structure that’s easy to adjust…and easy to understand.

Once you have your spreadsheet created, you can move on to the next social media audit step.

Step 2. List all of your social media platforms

This might seem really basic, but you can’t completely audit social media channels if you don’t audit all of your accounts.

Include links to each account and the corresponding handles and usernames so you can easily reference them throughout the rest of your audit.

After you’ve finished that, move on to the third step in your social media audit.

Step 3. Evaluate your social media branding

You want your website to use the right logos, colors, links, and language, right?

Why should your social media accounts be any different?

In your audit, look at all the social media accounts you just listed in the previous step.

The key is consistency. People should be able to identify your brand without seeing the name tied to your account.

Some questions to ask include:

• Do your profile and featured photos align with your standard brand imagery? Do they use an identifiable company logo?
• Are your social media handles consistent on different channels so people can easily find you?
• Is the language you use in all of your bios cohesive and relevant to your brand?
• Are all of the links you use in your bios relevant and active?

As an example, if you changed the links on all of your social accounts to a specific landing page for an event, and then changed it back after the event, did you remember to change it back on every channel?

If the answer is yes, you can move on to the fourth step of your social media audit.

Step 4. Pull important metrics from all of your accounts

Metrics, data, insights…whatever you want to call them…quantify your social media marketing performance.

Each social media platform has its own metrics and reporting methods, so how you access them depends on the platform.

Some metrics you might want to track in your spreadsheet are:

• Demographics
• Followers
• Engagements

If you’re running advertising campaigns on social media, you might want to track metrics related to your ads, like click-through rate or cost-per-click.

Another really useful set of metrics you can use comes from Google Analytics.

If you have Analytics implemented on your website, you can see things like the traffic on your website that comes from social media and how long people stay on your website after clicking through a social post.

Now that you know the data behind your accounts, you can jump to step five in your social media audit.

Step 5. Identify content that performed best

Figure out what worked best over a specific time period. Make note of the posts or tweets that got the most engagement from your audience on each platform, then dissect them.

Did the best post use video? Did you ask a question?

What do you think made your top posts stand out from the rest?

We’re almost at the end of this guide on how to perform a social media audit.

Step 6. Look for trends in your data

Trends are a lot easier to pinpoint after you’ve collected data over several periods of time, but you can still analyze trends within each social media audit.

Again, if your top posts across platforms all used video, that’s something you should invest in for your future strategies.

Maybe you’ve done monthly audits for a year and you’ve noticed your engagement dips around every holiday.

Once you’ve identified trends in your social media audit data, you can form an action plan to boost your social media strategy.

Step 7. Look at competitor social media accounts

You should always have some level of awareness when it comes to what your competitors are doing on social media.

See how often your competitors post. What do they post? When do they post?

While you won’t have nearly as much data about their social media strategies as you have about yours, take whatever you can from your evaluation.

If they’re doing something that works, like responding to every comment or sharing photos sent to them by their fans, you might want to consider adding that to your strategy, or doing whatever they’re doing, but better.

And this brings us to our conclusion where I tell you that WebFX has a team of social media professionals who can handle the social media audit for you.

Don’t hesitate to fill out the contact form on our website or give us a call to see how you can improve your social media presence.

And before you go, subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss out on the newest digital marketing video.

Thanks for watching!