Social media audits have proven to be an incredibly useful tool for business owners as they can show them where they’re losing money by wasting time, what’s not really working, and where they need to improve. Most businesses have only one person (if any) working on their social media profiles. This lack of attention leads to a drop in performance. Here is why your company needs social media auditing.
How to Complete a Social Media Audit
The first step in completing a social media audit is to identify which platforms you should be using. This usually means looking at where your customers are congregating online, so if your customers are mostly on Facebook, then that’s where you should be focusing your efforts. Once you’ve identified the platforms that need auditing, the next step is to assess the effectiveness of each channel by looking at things like:
- How many followers do I have?
- What kind of content am I sharing?
- How many likes and comments does my content receive?
How Often Should a company perform a social media audit?
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses, but it’s also a big responsibility. As the manager of your company’s social media accounts, you need to make sure that you’re keeping up with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. The first step to keeping up with best practices is performing regular audits of your social media accounts. Here are some tips on how often you should perform these audits:
Weekly
This is the bare minimum you should be doing if you have multiple social media accounts or if it’s been a while since your last audit. It will also give you time to correct any issues before they become major problems.
Monthly
If you have one main platform that receives most of your attention (such as Facebook), once per month is sufficient unless there are specific issues that need addressing more quickly than that.
Major Red Flags to Identify
If you are considering taking an audit for your company, you need to know what to look for. Here are some of the major red flags to identify when taking an audit for your company:
- Your competitors have more followers than you do
- You have no engagement on your posts
- You have no followers on your business page
- Your posts are not consistent with your brand image
How to Analyze Your Audit Results
Here are some tips on how to analyze your results:
- Look at the time of day that you post, and compare it with the time of day that your followers are most active. This will help you optimize your posting schedule so that your followers see the content when they’re most likely to engage with it.
- Examine the type of content you post. Are you posting too much or too little? If you’re posting too much, consider cutting back on the frequency of posts in order to avoid overwhelming your audience. If you’re posting too little, consider increasing how often you share new content with them so that they’re always interested in what’s happening in your community or industry (and so that their friends who aren’t following you yet see all the interesting things happening).
- Look at how often people are commenting on or sharing each piece of content that you shared — this can be a great way to measure how successful each individual piece was for helping build awareness about what’s going on within your community or industry and building connections between yourself and others who are interested in similar topics.
- Examine which types of social media accounts have the highest engagement rate, that is, which ones receive the most comments per post, and likes.
- Compare your paid content performance to organic content. Use the data from your audit to determine what types of posts do well organically and which ones require more paid promotion.
How to Decide When to Completely Re-strategize
After an audit, you may need to re-strategize your social media marketing. If you are not getting results from your social media marketing efforts and you feel that something needs to change in order to see success, it’s time to re-strategize. Here are some scenarios where it might be time to re-strategize:
- You aren’t seeing any results from your efforts
- Your audience isn’t engaging with your content
- You don’t know what content your audience wants or needs to see
The digital space is rapidly becoming one of the largest parts of most corporate marketing strategies. Marketing teams require digital analytics to help them understand what is effective and what isn’t when it comes to social media. NetbaseQuid provides social media analytics that is designed to help businesses discover the impact their online activities are having on consumers.
