Audit term is not just restricted to the finance and accounting domain. It applies in each those sectors where functions have been carried out with the help of strategic decision and dedicated investments. Digital marketing is also not an exception here. As a digital marketer, with the help of social media audit, you need to evaluate each of the digital marketing activities to judge its performance and handle its areas of improvements.
Based on the results, corrective actions need to be taken from time to time to enhance performance and sustain competition. Along with search engine optimisation and pay-per-click, social media marketing is equally important to spread brand awareness and boost online presence. A social media audit evaluates the effectiveness and ROI of social media marketing activities.
What is a Social Media Audit?
Social media audit is a key ingredient of a social media marketing plan. It evaluates how well your current social media performance is, how it works for you, and how better you can explore it for business benefits.
Why you need Social Media Audit?
For any business that has a social media presence on one or multiple networks needs to conduct personal social media audit from time to time.
The fundamental purpose is:
- to ensure that each of your social media profiles is on brand and functioning correctly
- to make sure that you’re using the right channels for your brand
- to identify and eliminate any inactive or abandoned accounts
- to analyse how relevant your social media activities are on your marketing goals
A social media audit reflects a complete picture of your activities in the form of metrics such as engagement, impressions, likes, retweets, shares, etc. The contemporary approach also focuses on interactions, sentiments from engaged users, response rates, and response times.
How to Conduct a Social Media Audit?
Have you ever wondered why you are a member of various LinkedIn groups but not getting any engagement? You do share your blogs and posts in different Facebook groups but unable to churn likes on it? You have made your pinned post both aesthetic and valuable in the context of content but failed to earn impressions? Are you consistent with your posts and posts mix across all channels? Well, you can unpack all such answers if you conduct a social media audit with a correct approach.
You need to have analytics in place for all platforms. Make a discipline to maintain monthly post schedule. At the end of the month, when you pull your monthly data from analytics, you will get a list of each of the post along with the posted date, time, permalink, reach, engagement, likes, retweet/repost, share, mention, impression, etc.
As a social media marketer, you should focus on engagement and impression of your tweets. Then analyse top 10 or 20 posts based on the highest reach, engagement, and impression. Once you have your list of top posts ready, it will be easy for you to interpret what type of content is working well for you. You will also come to know the best time to post. Also, it will pave the smooth way to strengthen your A/B testing regarding timing, content, and images.
Focus points while conducting Social Media Audit
1. Analyse the quality of your engagements
How great is it to see so many unread notifications daily morning in each of your social networks? Yes, it gives immense satisfaction to realise that your profile and social presence have come into notice of others and they have preferred to interact with you.
However, have you ever verified those accounts that have liked, shared or ping you in one or other way? If they are from similar industry and have similar interest, keep them engaged and build online rapport with them. Vice-versa, if they have by chance come across your feed and do not relate to your industry, you no need to invest a dedicated time in keeping them active. Because one or other day they will either discontinue following you or stop posting on your feed. The reason is the difference between theirs and your areas of interest and goals of social media.
2. Identify and eliminate branding gaps
Whatever social media audit results you get based on the analysis, divide it into two areas from your social media marketing goals perspective, strong areas and areas of improvements. Have a consistent focus on your strengths and convert your weak points into manageable areas.
Your social media presence should spread your brand awareness. Each of your social profile should speak about your brand and if required, keep making improvements as and when required.
Try to grab the attention of your target audience with the help of posting curated content, tagging them, mentioning them, sharing relevant posts, and keeping the important post as a pinned post.
3. Keep a note of personal messages
Not everyone will post on your feed directly. Some may tag you, or some may send you a private message. Remember not all direct messages are auto-generated. Most of the social media marketers are aware of the annoyance that DM creates.
It is very likely that your DM is knocking the door of opportunities for you. Never ignore them. If found irrelevant, you may delay replying but do read them! Similarly, keep sending personalised messages to thank, congratulate or acknowledge the things which matter to you.
4. Review your posts
This though sounds pretty obvious is of utmost importance. Your social media profile is the face of your business. Neither you can fake anything there, nor can you post anything on your feed that can harm your brand image.
Study your audience and their tastes; accordingly, tailor your content to post. If they like visual content, have a more focus on videos, podcasts, infographics and images with little text.
Keep a note of your most engaged posts and analyse them to figure out what was the high point in it that has benefited you well. Similarly, have a look at all those posts that were right from your point of view but somehow failed to perform well on social networks. Compare the results and draw conclusions.
Social media is a very handy place for communication and brand promotion. So, carefully and enthusiastically keep walking ahead in your journey.
Here are some tips for social media audit for the TWO most popular platforms which we believe: Twitter and Facebook.QL Tech Tip: Make the use of social media automation tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Post Planner, and others to schedule your posts so that you can reach the maximum audience when they are online. It will give you good results in your analytics.
Twitter Audit
Twitter is the most loved platform for users. It’s 140 character limit makes it more interesting. Furthermore, you can add images, links and Infographics to make it more interactive. Consequently, these attempts increase your post reach and network.According to Internet Live Stats, there are some 6,000 tweets sent per second on average, which translates to over 350,000 tweets per minute or about 500 million tweets per day.
Your social media audit for the Twitter platform should focus on:
- Likes on your posts
- Shares of your posts that can drive traffic to your website
- Comments and interactions on your posts
- Clicks and opens of your links and images
- Video views
- Number of followers
- are they increasing, decreasing, or fluctuating consistency
- are they relevant or fake
- are they active on their feed
- Number of followings – how many relevant people are you following
- are you following the people that belong to your industry
- are you following your dedicated followers
- how many of your following falls under fake identities
- what is the social authority of your following
- what is the engagement level with and from following
- Post reach
- Number of mentions
- Social authority
Twitteraudit.com tool is a handy tool that finds out your fake followers on Twitter
Twitter Analytics is the very first place to get an analysis of your monthly performance. You can also make use of various FREE and paid tools available. To name a few, they are:
- Sprout social
- Twitonomy
- Twitter Counter
- Moz Followerwonk
- Tweepi
Fanpage Karma will analyse your and your competitors’ accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.
Facebook Audit
According to the recent article of dreamgrow.com, Facebook has retained its dominant position among all social networking sites.
Considering the traffic Facebook can bring to your website, one should make the most use of it as a social media marketing platform. However, it is a crowded place, so you need to be active with your marketing skills. Paid advertisements work very well in case of Facebook. The Facebook audit will reveal how good your posts and ads are performing and what content suits best in front of what demography.
Facebook page audit is aimed to ensure that you are optimising your marketing efforts on Facebook. Like Twitter, Facebook also provides analytics on the same lines i.e. engagement, reach, impression, and others. Your social media audit for the Facebook Page should focus on:
- Audience
- are we posting in front of the right audience
- are we posting the content which our audience wants
- are we replying to each of our message and comments on our posts
- Content
- are we enough flexible in posting our content with respect to taste and timings of our target audience
- what type of content is working well and why
- what is the content mix we are posting and is it suffice based on competition and industry standards
- Brand promotion
- does our Facebook page, profile picture, and cover image provides all information which a user needs to know
- are you reviewing your thumbnails which are in display for your audience
- are we presenting our brand consistently
- are we confusing our readers and users with brand identity since we have multiple Facebook pages for multiple goals
Facebook Analytics is the very first place to get an analysis of your monthly performance. Furthermore, there are various FREE and paid tools available, like:
- Socialbakers
- Facebook Insights
- LikeAlyzer
- Simply Measured
- Cyfe
- Agorapulse
- Quintly
- Comfo
- Brand24
- Scoreboard Social
- Rival IQ
QL Tech Tip: To boost engagement on Facebook, maximise the use of tab apps.
Closing thoughts
Here, we have tried to facilitate our readers by providing the most popular tools for Twitter Audit and Facebook Audit which every social media marketer wants. The importance of Social Media is undeniable, and so as social media marketing. And what’s the use of such marketing activities which we don’t measure to analyse the importance and effectiveness. Hence, social media audit is crucial. The topic of social media audit has very broad coverage. One blog is not enough to conclude on any results. Keep checking our resources section, there are many FREE resources lined up for you which will aid you in conducting your social media audit in line with your marketing goals.