How To Run a Social Media Audit in 2024
As a digital marketer who utilizes social media for most marketing campaigns, you might need to do a sort of overhaul if you want to enhance growth and sales. Social media is changing how marketers run their movement, and it will be an anomaly to overlook such an aspect.
When most marketers hear the word ‘audit,’ they often envision a stressful ordeal where they have to swim in figures all day. If you have done a tax audit before, you probably have enough reason to be scared.
The reason for social media audits it to help measure your marketing strategy and various means to grow your business. Through an audit, you will find out where the opportunity lies and what you can exploit. With a social media audit, you can broaden your audience, discover new leads, and increase conversion rate.
Social media audit holds lots of incredible benefits and positive sides and should be something you should pay attention to. Without wasting further time, here is a guide on how to run a social media audit.
Table of Contents
What Is A Social Media Audit?
A social media audit helps give you the ideal overview of all your social effort and exposes the best ways to improve results. After a successful social media audit, you will get a single strategy document detailing all your social accounts with important information.
1.Track Down All Your Social Handles
Do you think you can list down all your social handles without any assistant? You often discover an old abandoned account that was created even before your business had a social strategy. To run a social media audit, start by recording all the social accounts that you and your team use.
You might want to inspect your departments and know for sure if they are using a unified system or numerous accounts. To carry this task properly, you might need to do a little leg walk for some information.
Here are some tips that will help you find all your social media accounts:
Search The Web
A quick way to find out all your social media handles is to punch your company’s name on a search engine like Google. When you come across a strange account, do some investigation to determine who or what they are. They could be a fan account, imposter account run by someone not affiliated to your company.
Search Social Media Networks
Through search engine research, you should uncover every social media account using your business name. If you want to be more specific, visit each social media network and use the search button to search for your brand. If you had opened an account in the past, it would probably come up.
After tracking down all accounts, document all of them, including those owned by fans or perhaps imposters. You can contact each account holder to find out their purpose or mission. Most often, it is always a case of a passionate fan taking things too far.
If the account holders see uncooperative, do not hesitate to escalate the issue to the social network. Also, ensure you set up a social media monitoring program that alerts you of any imposter in the future.
2. Customized And Brand Each Account
All recorded accounts might have some outdated branding styles that need updating. Your aim should be to rebrand to bring it to tune with the current brand image and standards.
Inspect each account individually and determine if the cover and profile pictures are consistent with your brand images, hashtags, keywords, and brand voice. Here are a few of the components you need to pay attention to.
- Profile/Bio Text – This box often comes with limited characters, and your plan should be to ensure all fields are completed and reflect your brand messaging. The bio section tells your potential followers who you are and what your business stands for.
Handle – It is best you use the same handle across all your social accounts. That way, potential customers can easily find you across numerous social media platforms. However, you can tweak the handle if it is for a different purpose.
Verification – Having a verified account goes a long way to set you aside from fan or imposter accounts. Also, potential customers won’t have to be confused, especially when faced with more than one similar looking account. But with the check mark badge, your social account becomes easy to discover.
Pinned Post – If there are pinned posts on your social accounts, go through and ensure they are up to date.
Link – This is the part where you include the link to your website. That way, followers or potential customers can easily visit your website for more interaction.
3. Analyze Channel Performance
The only way to get the most from your social accounts is to record their overall performance. But to accurately evaluate performance, you need to understand the kind of performance you’re trying to achieve.
If you have two twitter accounts for customer support and sales, the metric used to measure performance won’t be the same. Through your mission statement, you will discover the purpose of each account and how to measure performance.
When it comes to a good pointer for a good performance, it will be website traffic and conversion, which is the business’s crucial goal. A social media platform like Facebook has an analytic that allows you to monitor or evaluate the account’s performance since its creation.
But if you’re looking for an incredible tool that will give you all the information you need, you might need to check out Google Analytics. With a detailed overview of your social accounts, you will formulate better marketing strategies that might work.
4. Choose The Right Channel
After getting a record of all your social media accounts, the next step will be to decide which channel is best for your brand. That way, you focus your marketing efforts on one account for the best optimum result.
One of the things that will help you choose the right channel is thinking about each account’s goals. You need to assess the account’s performance, its demographics, and goals. With this information, you will be able to choose the right channel for your marketing campaign.
The reason for focusing on one channel is to maximize both your effort and result. Also, you want to put all your energy into something that promises the best return of investment. Take note that this decision isn’t permanent. You can always choose another account after a couple of months next time you run an audit.
The one way to choose the right social account is to understand each social account’s performance report and the best with the majority of your target market. After you’ve got what you need, revisit each social account, and create new goals based on everything you know so far.
By using the right channel, you will maximize the outcome of your marketing campaigns. No doubt, it will lead to more sales, more significant customer base, and traffic.
5. Identify High-Performing Content
A social media audit aims to find out the content that resonates well with your target market and imitate these posts. Please go through all the accounts and compare content based on their performance. However, it could be hard to compare posts from different social media platforms since they often use another metric.
There are lots of tools that will help you identify these key metrics, and thus, we’re going to get them all back. When it comes to high-performing posts, there are tools which can help you fish them out. When you use the right tool, it will give you insight such:
- Most popular post
- Most popular mention
- Estimated social media reach
- Social media likes
- Social media comments, etc.
There are lots of filters which you can use to get the definitive account with a high performing post. Through your audit, you should split the record based on the social media platform you want to audit. Using Google Analytics, you will uncover more, like your referrals, audience location, and more.
6. Understand The Audience Of Each Channel
Before you start running your social media campaigns, you want to make sure that you’re using the best account for such purpose. The more powerful a social media account is, the more successful your campaign will be. By understanding your audience, crafting a good marketing copy that appeals to them is possible.
Determining your audience demographic is a significant step since it helps you make a more concrete connection with your target market. For instance, Snapchat users are pretty much younger compared to Facebook users. While LinkedIn tends to have a relatively higher income compared to any other social media platform. It’s also necessary to mention that Instagram is one of the dominating media helps for a higher income. By managing followers on this platform, you can achieve the targeted business goal easily. You can use the hashtag generator tool to get this thing simply done.
When you analyze and understand your demographics, you won’t have a hard time getting them to take action. All the social accounts you discovered, ensure you analyze each demographic and be sure they are your ideal market.
With a robust tool like Google Analytics, you will not only know who your demographics are; you will also find out their location, age, the device used, period, and so much more. Analyze all your social accounts by using each social media’s built-in analytic tools.
Most businesses fail because they failed to access such information or perhaps fail to understand the demographics. Knowledge is power, and the right kind will help you decide that will benefit you in the long run.
7. Calculate ROI
Every marketer aims to pull off a successful campaign without running at a loss. If you’re running a sponsored ad on any social media platforms, then calculating your return of an investment will ensure you’re running.
Ideally, this entails measuring how much you’re spending on social media marketing compared to how much value your effort contributes. With information like this, you can later manage your campaigns and even tweak a few things for the best possible result.
Take note that ROI is not always about the money. It could take the shape of something else, especially on what you consider value.
In case you’re not good with calculation, numerous tools can help you like Hootsuite Impact and numerous of them.
If that doesn’t sound like a pretty nice idea, you can always grab a book and go old-school with this strategy. You can find out a lot more about your revenue and input, then calculate and find out if you’re running at a loss or win.
8. Explore New Social Media Platform
There is always a new social media platform popping out now and then. Although you mustn’t jump into every wagon, you can utilize some that have great potential. When you delve into a new social media platform, you have an advantage as an early adopter.
It means you will have a better chance of growing a community compared to your competitors. While conducting your social media audit, ensure you highlight the new social platform you want to explore. But if you’re already invested in numerous other social accounts, then you might want to leave this out.
In other words, if your platforms are already spilling impressive results, then there is no need for dabbling into a new social media platform.
Conclusion
If you dream of building an incredibly strong brand, social media audit shouldn’t be unchecked on your marketing checklist. To ensure you’re playing accordingly, running a social media audit will be a game-changer.
That is because you’re getting access to information that will help you run campaigns that convert visitors into paying customers.
Whatever happens, have in mind that all it takes to succeed is to remain consistent and determined to scale through your social media marketing strategies. If you run a business and you’re yet to start conducting a social media audit, perhaps now is a perfect time.
