Imagine putting all your blood, sweat and tears into a fabulous social media marketing strategy, only never knowing whether it’s actually working. That’s precisely what you do if you’re not auditing your social media marketing efforts.
Auditing what you do on social media to promote your brand is vital to monitor, optimise and improve your efforts. Heard of the phrase don’t rest on your laurels? Well, that applies perfectly here. Don’t sit back and assume your social media is working for you; you must check, check, and check again.
Creating content without analysing what you’re doing can leave you in the dark when it comes to knowing whether you’re making tangible outcomes for your business. Regular audits are essential to track your marketing activity’s success on your social platforms. It will also help you to make informed decisions about where you need to improve and also to be able to demonstrate analytics and your thoughts to other members of your team or your stakeholders.
Auditing your social media marketing efforts may sound daunting, but fear not; it doesn’t have to be complicated. Read on for our top tips on creating a workable audit to ensure your hard work is rewarded.
How to create a social media marketing audit
Let’s start with a quick explanation of what a social media audit actually is. It’s a way to examine your brand’s metrics to measure success, opportunities, growth and what action you can take to improve your social media presence.
Many businesses find it helpful to start with a social media audit template (we can create one of these for you!) which should include information such as:
Ideally, it would help if you carried out an audit regularly – either monthly or quarterly – to get the best visibility of your progress. When you’re ready to carry out the first one, you should follow a few simple steps.
Work out which social media platforms to focus on and create clearly-defined goals for each
Begin by making a list of every social media platform you’re signed up with; be sure to include any historical platforms you haven’t touched for years but may still be active. As long as you aren’t doing anything with these old profiles, you don’t need to track them, but you do need to ensure they are entirely under your company’s control and correctly claimed. Once you have listed all your profiles, you can now decide which platforms will work best for you and which ones to focus on. Now you have your most important platforms decided, you can create clear goals for each one. These might include things such as:
Setting clear and defined goals will help guide your presence and let you know which metrics to follow for each platform.
Be consistent with your branding
We all know that being consistent with your branding is essential, but sometimes this can get overlooked when it comes to your social media presence. Ensure that your social media branding, language and promotions are consistent across all platforms and match the rest of your marketing materials. You want people to know it’s you they’re looking at without looking for your brand name. When conducting your audit, ensure your profiles are in sync regarding creative content, promotions and campaigns. Some things to look at when doing this are:
Dive into the data, and find out which posts perform the best
By now, you should know which profiles you’re auditing and which metrics you’re looking for. Now is the time to get into the nitty gritty – the data. By looking at this, you can discover if you’re reaching your goals and where there is room for improvement.
By looking at individual posts and how they perform, you can get a really good idea of what types of content work best for you and which you should focus on creating more of in the future. Your analytics for each platform will show you how many impressions and engagement each post generates and what its reach is. By doing this, you can determine what content type your audience likes the most, whether it be videos, polls, imagery or entertainment. Then you can give them more of what they want and start developing more social media content ideas that will fit the bill!
You should also look closely at your demographic data, focusing on how you speak to your audience and prioritise various content or platforms. Different audience types appreciate different brand voices – think of the way you would talk to a 17-year-old compared to how you would speak to an 80-year-old – totally different!
Look at the link between your social media presence and your website
By examining the relationship between the two, you can gain insight into which posts lead to good interest from your audience and which are the most valuable channels for generating leads. To find your traffic numbers, go into Google Analytics and click on ‘Acquisition’, then filter by ‘Social’.
Keep an eye out for new social media platforms
New platforms are constantly popping up, and while most of them fizzle out fairly quickly, some stick and go on to be the next big thing. Check out all new social media platforms and consider which ones may hold opportunities for your brand. Adopting a new platform early can put you in a healthy place ahead of your competitors. Ensure you have a section on your social media audit spreadsheet specifically for new platforms you’d like to explore.
Think about new objectives
If you’ve followed all the steps above, by now, you should be coming to the end of your first social media audit. Well done! But you’re not done just yet. Now is the time to consider your plans for the future. The whole point of the audit is to help you understand your current position and where you want to be ultimately. Do you want to attract more followers on a particular platform? Broaden your audience? Or gain more engagement? Now you’ve done your audit, you have all the information you need to make these decisions in an informed and logical manner.
We can help you!
Remember, auditing your social media marketing efforts can be a manageable task. By following the advice above, you can conduct regular audits to ensure that your time and energy spent on social media marketing campaigns aren’t wasted. If you’re still a little stuck for ideas or would like help creating a workable audit, please don’t hesitate to book your free 30-minute strategy meeting with our Sophie.