Conducting a Social Media Audit

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Video Transcript | Intro

Before you can set goals for what you want to achieve with your social media strategy, you need to analyze and understand the effectiveness of your existing social media efforts. Through the process of an audit you can assess what’s working, what’s not and know how you can adjust course. If your company does not have an existing social media presence, you can skip ahead to the next lesson.

Audit Social Media Properties

To start, use a social media log to list all of your social properties, follower counts, engagement rates and average activity per week. This information will be useful as you evaluate your current social channels. Having a social profile simply for the sake of having it is not a good practice - if a channel is not bringing you quality traffic and sparking engagement, consider closing it down. However, before you close your accounts, consider if applying your new social strategy will bring life to dormant accounts. 

Social Channels Traffic

If you’re tracking traffic from your social channels to your website, you’ll want to examine not only the volume but the conversion rates. For example, you may only get 20% of your traffic from one social channel but it results in repeat purchases, sign ups for your newsletter and views on your blog. In contrast, 60% may come from another social channel but most of those visitors end up leaving the site shortly after they arrive. 

Understand Your Audience

You’ll also want to get a thorough understanding of your audience. This is a good time to sync with your marketing department and see if they have any information to share about your customers’ age, gender, buying habits and interests. If you don’t have any intel yet, consider sending a survey to your customers to gather data about general demographics as well as social media habits. A better understanding of your audience will help you decide which social networks you should be engaging on. For a younger demographic, Instagram may be the best channel for your brand. For an audience of professionals, LinkedIn may be the best option. 

Competitive Analysis

From here, move onto a competitive analysis. How does your competition use social media and what seems to be working for them? Do you share a similar audience and can you gather insights into the kind of content that catches their attention? If they run promotions - do they manage to hook their customers with a certain tactic or social channel? Are there elements of their strategy you could adapt to your own? Any elements you want to avoid?

Social Media Value

Which brings you to the last critical component of the audit. The key question you want to ask yourself is what value is your company adding to your customers through social media now vs. the value you want to be adding. An honest and thorough examination of your previous efforts will provide you with critical insights of how to move forward with building the best strategy for your business. 

Looking for more? Checkout our blog and learn How to Conduct a Social Media Audit (Includes a Free Template)