In today’s digital age, having a robust social media strategy is crucial for businesses. To ensure your strategy is effective and aligned with your business goals, conducting a social media audit is essential. This guide will walk you through the process, highlighting the importance of a social media audit.
What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is the process of reviewing your business’s metrics across various social platforms to assess growth, opportunities, and areas for improvement. It helps you answer key questions such as:
- How is our growth on social media?
- Are we meeting larger business goals?
- Are we impacting the bottom line?
Audits are beneficial whether you have an established social media strategy or are just starting. They can help you create a strategy if you don’t have one or optimize an existing one. Ideally, you should perform an audit quarterly for real-time adjustments, yearly to understand the brand’s social media health.
7 Steps to Conduct a Social Media Audit
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before evaluating your social media performance, you need to know what success looks like for each platform. Identify your goals, which can include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating more leads and sales
- Boosting community engagement
- Growing your followers or subscribers
It’s okay to have different goals for each platform. Once you’ve identified them, you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Make a List of Your Social Accounts
Take inventory of all your social accounts, including those you’re less active on. This process helps you discover new opportunities to grow and find old accounts that may need to be evolved or deleted.
Step 3: Check Your Branding
Ensure your voice, brand persona, colours, images, messaging, and campaigns are consistent across platforms. This step creates a cohesive experience for your audience.
Step 4: Analyze Your Analytics
Focus on metrics related to your goals. For example, if your TikTok goal is to grow your audience, pay attention to impressions, reach, views, and followers. Use the native social platform’s insights section or a tool like Sprout Social to gather data.
Step 5: Get to Know Your Audience
Analyze demographic data to understand your audience’s age, time zone, and content consumption habits. Adjust your strategy based on these insights to better reach and connect with your audience.
Step 6: Identify Top Performing Content
Look at your top posts to determine what resonates with your audience. Identify patterns in content types, topics, and publishing times to inform your content strategy.
Step 7: Analyze Your Findings
Perform a SWOT analysis to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use these insights to make informed decisions about your social media strategy and evolve it for each platform.