Social media audits are an essential part of any social media strategy for organizations seeking to optimize their social media presence. This article will provide expert tips for conducting a successful social media audit that improves any social strategy and unleashes brand potential.
What is a Social Media Audit?
As part of a social media strategy, businesses often conduct a social media audit to assess their current social media presence, content, performance metrics, and audience engagement. An audit allows brands to analyze and review performance across social channels to measure the success of their social media strategy.
What’s the Purpose of a Social Media Audit?
The purpose of conducting a social media audit is to help brands understand how their social media accounts are performing. By assessing progress across all platforms, businesses can get a clear picture of their social media presence, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and pinpoint areas of improvement to focus on next.
Benefits of a Social Media Audit
Every brand using social media can benefit from taking the time to assess its strategy and performance across channels. Conducting a social media audit can help your brand:
Discover opportunities
A social media audit can help businesses uncover untapped growth opportunities. The review and analysis of social media data and metrics enable brands to discover new opportunities, leads, and marketing opportunities that they wouldn’t have been able to tap into without a proper audit. These opportunities can lead to an increase in brand awareness, improved customer engagement, and ultimately increased revenues.
Enhance your social media campaigns
The benefits of a social media audit also include helping businesses improve the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Audits allow brands to examine past campaign results and performance to identify what did and didn’t work well. This information can then be used to update their social strategy and focus on those areas of improvement.
Maximize ROI
Social media audits can contribute to maximizing brand ROI by identifying underutilized resources and areas of improvement in their social strategy. With this information, brands can make informed decisions on where to better allocate resources to make the most effective use of their social media campaigns and increase returns.
Tips to Perform a Social Media Audit
Social media audits can feel like a daunting task, but we’re here to help. The following are our top tips on how to audit your brand’s social media accounts to ensure the best results.
1) Listing all social media accounts
The first important step of any social media audit is to list all the organization’s existing social media accounts, including both active and inactive ones. The list should include high-priority accounts, fraudulent ones (accounts created by someone who is not the business owner), as well as past accounts that have been abandoned. A spreadsheet program or any free online audit template is a great tool to list and organize all the audit data in one place.
2) Reviewing your social media profiles
The evaluation of a business’s social media profiles, including general information, visuals, and branding, is key to a thorough social media audit. Organizations should check their social media handles to ensure consistency across all platforms so customers can quickly find them. Visuals should showcase the brand image and values, while the bios and contact information should be reviewed for any phone numbers, emails, links, and website errors or changes. Social media profiles should reflect the brand’s vision and messaging across all platforms.
3) Analyze your social media content
Social media audits are an excellent opportunity to identify top-performing and underperforming posts. Organizations can efficiently analyze existing content by first categorizing it into buckets, such as:
- Type of content: promotional, informational, entertainment, or educational
- Content format: images, videos, or articles
Categorization enables brands to identify gaps in their social media content, such as topics or questions their audience is interested in. These gaps can be opportunities to expand their content offering to reach new audiences and encourage engagement in their existing community. This analysis can also help brands understand what content they should focus on and what content should be improved or discarded.
4) Assess your platform performance
Analytics tools can help businesses gather and interpret platform-specific data for their social media audit. Social media analytics allow brands to dig into data to identify whether they are hitting their target or not, as well as find potential leads and room for improvement.
5) Identify your best performing posts
An important step in any social media audit is to leverage successful posts as benchmarks for future content. Those benchmarks will help organizations find patterns within their content to see what content works best for their audience on each platform based on metrics such as likes, retweets, and shares.
6) Keep track of social media metrics
Social media metrics are a crucial part of a social media audit. Key metrics to track include engagement rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate, as well as impressions (views), engagements (comments, likes, shares), and reach.
7) Benchmark against competitors
A brand’s audit should include learning from its successful competitors to compare strategies and identify areas for improvement. Competitors are great sources of information on what content works best for their brand and why, and brands can even tap into them to see what their strategies lack for additional ideas and opportunities.
Social Media Audit Examples
Social media audits help businesses across the board identify areas for improvement and potential issues in their social media content, advertising, SEO, and compliance, to name a few. Here is a summary of different scenarios that highlight the purpose of performing a social media audit.
- Advertising campaigns: A brand looking to assess the effectiveness of its social media advertising campaigns performs an audit to analyze its targeting, content, and performance to identify areas for improvement and adjust its advertising strategy accordingly.
- Social media presence: A brand uses audits to seek recommendations to optimize its social media presence and identify new opportunities by analyzing its social media profiles, engagement metrics, and content strategy.
- Compliance with industry regulations: Brands that must stay compliant with industry regulations, such as healthcare organizations, use audits to review their organization’s social media policies, content, and messaging to ensure they meet the necessary industry regulatory standards.
Common Mistakes to Avoid During a Social Media Audit
To reap all the benefits of a social media audit, businesses should stay away from the top three most common mistakes during an audit:
Overlooking smaller platforms
A social media audit should include all social media platforms businesses are present on, including smaller ones where they might not have a massive following. These smaller platforms may allow brands to reach a more niche audience that aligns with their brand’s target demographics, and an audit is the perfect opportunity to see how the brand can include those platforms in its overall strategy.
To identify these smaller platforms, businesses should consider conducting a thorough audience analysis and monitor brand mentions across all platforms to determine where their target audience spends their time online and what platforms they use to engage with their brand.
Neglecting user engagement
User engagement is a key metric to evaluate during a social media audit. Neglecting engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares, can have a significant impact on the result of an audit. These metrics are key to helping businesses optimize their social media campaigns’ effectiveness, as low engagement rates can indicate that the content isn’t resonating or valuable to the brand’s target audience and needs to be adjusted accordingly, while high engagement rates indicate that the social media campaigns are working well for the target audience.
Ignoring social media metrics
Data-driven insights are crucial for creating and optimizing successful social media campaigns. Ignoring these metrics can lead to missed opportunities for improvement and growth. Key metrics to monitor during a social media audit include reach, engagement, click-through rates, and conversions. By analyzing these metrics, brands can identify areas for improvement and optimize their campaigns to reach top performance.
Learn More About ICUC Social Media Audits
Social media audits are valuable tools to empower businesses and individuals to optimize their online presence, streamline content strategies, and foster meaningful connections with their target audience. Social media strategy services offer comprehensive social media audits to meet organizations’ unique needs to connect with their audience and tap into opportunities.
Schedule a call with us to learn more about how ICUC can help you unleash your social media potential with expert social media audits.