Reading Time: 3 minutesSocial media is one of the most potent marketing channels available today. If you haven’t made a concentrated effort to connect with your target audience via social media, you’re missing out on a potentially vast audience. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram each have unique features and benefits, and you should think carefully about what kind of social media profiles resonate the most with your business goals and which platforms are most likely to attract your ideal customer base.
Like any other aspect of modern digital marketing, social media marketing requires consistent attention. It is not a “set it and forget it” marketing channel. Social media hinges on making connections with others and building relationships, so you can’t expect to sit back and let customers do all the work when it comes to social media marketing. You need to be consistently engaging with your audience, providing them with valuable interactions and interesting content, and keeping them interested in coming back to your social media profiles.
Occasionally, you need to revisit your social media strategy to determine what’s working and what isn’t. As you take your business into 2020, make a social media audit a priority for your marketing team.
What Is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a relatively straightforward concept: you perform a thorough review of all of your social media profiles to determine each profile’s strengths and weaknesses. You need a method of extracting valuable data trends from your social media profiles so you can analyze it and determine what works and what doesn’t with your latest social media efforts.
Social media auditing can be as simple as building a spreadsheet to track each of your social media profiles, your follower counts on each profile, follower demographics, engagement levels, and your most popular pieces of content on each profile. You can take this a step further and add more metrics based on your business’s unique goals and operational style. As you conduct your social media audits each year, you can expand the scope of the audit to collect the information you need to make more informed decisions about your social media marketing.
You can also leverage the analytical tools available on every social media platform to help you with your audit. For example, Twitter Analytics provides you with an intuitive display of your tweet activity, follower engagement trends, tweet impressions, and much more in intuitive graph format. Facebook offers similar tools, and you can use these graphs to track your social media performance in timeframes you define.
What Happens During a Social Media Audit?
Once you have a detailed report of all your social media profiles you can conduct your audit. This is a more straightforward process than it may seem at first. You basically measure how much social media engagement on each of your social media profiles generated conversions and sales. For example, your 2019 social media audit may show you that while you spent much more on Facebook marketing, your Twitter profile actually generated much more engagement and many more conversions with much lower expenditure. Now you know that you don’t need to spend as much on your Facebook advertising since it does not generate the conversions you expected It also shows you the potential of your Twitter profile for generating conversions and sales.
In addition to data collection and extrapolation, your social media audit should also involve researching your own brand on Google. Search for your company name and see what social media pages appear in the results. This is a great time to make sure there are no fake accounts impersonating your brand or people related to your company. A social media audit is essentially a process to check that your social media marketing campaigns and profiles are working as intended and generating acceptable returns on your investments.
What Are the Benefits of a Social Media Audit?
You should strive to complete at least one thorough social media audit per year for several reasons:
- Social media audits reduce your overhead spending. Advertising on social media costs money, and you need to make sure that every dollar you spend is generating acceptable returns. Your audit might show you that you are overspending on an underperforming social media platform or vice versa.
- A detailed audit helps you make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts. Once you know what’s working and what isn’t with your social media marketing campaigns you can start rearranging your social media campaigns to suit your goals better. For example, if you discover you’ve been overspending on Facebook ads, you can divert that excess capital into other social media platforms that have been more successful or use it for other improvements to your marketing campaigns.
- Your audit can help you increase engagement with your audience. When you perform a social media audit and determine your strengths and weaknesses, you can determine the best ways to reach your audience on your different social media profiles. You might discover that one platform is much better suited to your target audience than another, and you will ultimately create better experiences for your customers.
A social media audit is a straightforward process with multifaceted benefits. The insights gained can help you make better social media marketing decisions in 2020 and beyond and lay the groundwork for even more detailed audits in the future.
