Most businesses today have social media strategy. But we often see some of these companies improvising without plans. The reasons for this are well known. Many companies inherit social media presence from people. They do not take time to think about it and get insights on what works and does not work.
It is essential to conduct a quick audit to know whether your social media strategy aligns with your business objectives. The guide below will help you know what social media audit is about, how to conduct it, and its impacts on your business strategy.
What is Social Media Audit?
Don’t freak out with the word audit. Social media audit is not nor is it supposed to be tedious. It involves reviewing your business’ metrics to assess activities, growth, and opportunities that may improve your social media presence.
Even though brands have different priorities, ensure you customize your social audit template depending on your needs and the following aspects :
- Referral Traffic
- Engagement metrics
- Profile Information
- Publishing metrics
Remember to include previous percentage changes in any metric. Tracking your monthly or annual metric is essential as it shows your business’ seasonal changes. If you are looking for your business’ bigger picture, conduct the audits monthly or quarterly. This allows you to make changes timely.
Benefits of a Social Media Audit
- Conducting an audit helps you answer multiple questions about your business relationship with your online target audience.
- The social audit lets you know what marketing techniques will help you attain your established goals and which ones need revision. After an audit, the result you acquire will help you plan for your future social media marketing campaigns and upcoming audits.
- Conducting audits ensures your brand is well and constantly represented in all social media platforms.
- You get the right information to conduct a SWOT analysis and identify different opportunities, your strengths, and weaknesses.
- With audits, you can measure your brand performance in different social media channels based on engagement, outreach metrics, volume, and sentiments.
- You have the chance of grabbing your brand opportunities when they arise. The world of social media has numerous events to enhance your brand awareness, and it is your work to make use of them when they arise.
How to Perform a Social Media Audit
1. Identify Your Social Media Profiles
Locating your social media profiles can be easy with the right business marketing strategy. However, the profiles are most found on lesser-known platforms that lost their popularity. Apart from the big known names in social media like Twitter and Facebook, businesses should look out for other social platforms like LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, and Google Plus.
2. Record Your Information
Have a record of every platform’s profile, the number of followers, and the people to access it. Track down how frequently you update your profile and how your viewers post and respond to other comments. Identify whether there is always a rise of engagements in every post or they prefer few updates.
3. Complete Your Profile by Checking
After identifying your social media profiles, go through each of them to ensure you have filled all input options. Social media platforms vary based on the amount of business information it requires. Checking your profile helps ensure your business is gaining the most from your social media accounts.
What is the Cost of Conducting a Social Media Audit?
Audits are an asset. When thinking of conducting an audit, look at how much profit you will get from it rather than the cost. Different price ranges are involved in audits depending on services that fit your business model and what you need.
There are key ways of conducting a social media channel audit. You can either do it manually, use related apps or hire NetBase Quid, a digital analytic company, to do it. Hiring NetBase Quid is the best option because they know the statistics to check and interpret them effectively. This way, you will be able to get the best result when optimizing your social media campaigns.
