Social media sites have become popular platforms for showcasing brands, products, services, and marketing strategies in recent times. Many startups are building their companies on the internet depending on the sales and revenue through these online entities. If you have adopted social media marketing strategies to publicize and grow your business, then conducting a social media audit can do wonders for your business.
What is a Social Media Audit?
Social Media Audit is a simple process of monitoring and analyzing your brand’s performance through social media posts, videos, photos, and other digital data across all social media channels. It includes; noting page aesthetics, content quality, web traffic, audience demographics, channel-specific metrics, and publishing strategies.
5 Steps to Perform a Social Media Audit
Many brands are enthusiastic about creating several social media channels across several popular platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. But, after a period, they wonder why their channel is not performing to their expectations. They fail to monitor and track their social media channel performances to improve their brand recognition traffic and visibility.
Here we list the steps to perform a social media audit for your brand channels to rate their performances and find which platforms to focus more.
Step 1: Find Your Social Media Platforms, Profiles, and Pages
The first step to conduct a social media audit is to find all your social media platforms, pages, and profiles. Make a note of your brand’s profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Check whether the business profile is complete with brand info, contact number, and website links.
- Make a note of brand name and URL for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter Profiles
- Check for Profile completion including Brand Info, Contact Info and Website Links
- Double check on aesthetics including Profile Picture, Cover Photo and Theme, High Resolution Images, Verification Check, Company Logo
- Improve quality of content with creative Taglines, crisp descriptions, grammar and punctuation check
Step 2: Analyse Each Social Media Profile
The next step is to analyze each of your social media profiles separately. Check for Facebook Insights to find who your audience is, the growth of your page and newer strategies to create. For Twitter, you can assess analytics data of your page to the performance. Hashtag engagement and visual content matter the most for your Instagram account. Check for regular maintenance, consistency, and frequency of posts.
Check these factors in respective social media accounts,
- Analyze Facebook Insights
- Monitor your posts, visual content, comments generated
- Hashtag engagement
- Access to Analytics data
- Check Frequency of posts
Step 3: Check for Most Shared and Viewed Content
It is important to identify your top social media posts across all platforms to check the recognition, visibility, and reach of your brand. Check for the most shared and viewed content to know which posts are getting the most shares and views. You can adopt similar strategies to develop the quality of your content. This data can help create unique content for each social media platform.
Check for most shared and viewed content like,
- Most Facebook Engagements
- Most Instagram Shares
- Most Retweets
- Most YouTube Views
- Most Pinterest Shares
- Most Page Views
Step 4: Know Your Audience Engagement
Followers are the key to the success and growth of your business. Online Branding and marketing strategies must be developed based on the rate of web traffic and audience engagement. When there is a disconnect between your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers drastically, then you should know that something is not working properly. Consistency is crucial. Audit your followers and know your web traffic rate. The more people connect with your posts, the higher will be your engagements.
Check these factors to know your audience engagement,
- Facebook Fans, Instagram Followers, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn Followers
- Web and App Users
- Visiting Countries
- Age and Gender
- Comments Generated
- Per Individual Follower
Step 5: Determine the Social Media Platforms to Use
It is not necessary to have brand accounts on all social media platforms. Know which suits you the most and concentrate only on that. Choose the most popular and working platforms based on business and web traffic to achieve greater success in the future. Initially, it might take some time to determine which ones are useful and performing in the best manner but with time, you can understand it. Your brand should focus only on the target market and audience.
Statistics show that most companies prefer these social media platforms in this ratio,
- 70% of businesses prefer having a Facebook Page
- 40% of brands are active on Instagram
- 20% of brands use Twitter
- 85% of companies have LinkedIn accounts
Apart from these, many brands use YouTube, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and Snapchat to deliver their messages to the target audience.
Once you start the process of social media audit by using these steps, it becomes easier for you to create a stronger social media presence with greater content and audience.