The social media audit is a key strategic tool to thoroughly evaluate the performance of company profiles, identify strengths and weaknesses, and compare with competitors.
Through detailed analysis of content, engagement and KPIs, companies can gain valuable insights and align social strategy with business goals.
In today’s digital landscape, social media presence has become a crucial element for business success. However, being present is not enough: one must constantly monitor, analyze and optimize one’s activities.
This is why the Social Media Audit is a strategic process for your company and one that can be carried out by a social media agency with 10 years of experience.
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is a process of in-depth analysis and evaluation of a brand’s social media presence and activities. It consists of examining all of the company’s social profiles to gather key information on performance, content, engagement and other relevant indicators
This tool gives you an account of what works and what doesn’t in your social media marketing strategy company.
It also consists of monitoring:
- some metrics that describe your audience, such as socio demographic data, geographic location etc;
- The achievement of KPIs of profiles, post and social campaigns.
In this article we will see how to do an accurate audit. The goal of the analysis is to have the knowledge needed to change the weaknesses in your social strategy and to correct the weaknesses.
Social media audit: essential tools for social media managers
Before you begin the actual operational phase, we suggest you make an outline of what you need to do and the things you need:
- Make a list of all your social media or corporate social networks
- Look for a Social Media Audit template to help you along the way.
- choose an ad hoc tool
- Deciding which metrics and KPIs are important
- Identify goals for improvement
- Planning the next steps.
These are basically the tasks you will find yourself doing during the Social Media Audit.
Social media audit tools
As you can see, we also talked about tools. There are in fact online software, free or paid, that a social media agency can use to support your work.
For example, those we give in the list below:
- Sprout Social
- HootSuite
- Unmetric
- Zoho Social
- Sociality.io
These are in truth platforms for social media management tout court.
You can use them to schedule posts and field your social strategy more quickly and effectively.
They are useful for conducting Social Media Audit properly because they monitor metrics and KPIs over time. This means having a good portion of the work ready.
Social Audit and Online Templates
Templates are also useful tools for streamlining the Audit. Just Google for free templates.
We recommend using them because they provide you with a working grid.
Free social media audit template: A well-made template is the one from HubSpot, which you can download for free.
Found here:
- a summary and performance report, where the most important and indicative information from the entire Audit will converge;
- other sections such as one reserved for the demographics of followers, or geographical origin, etc.
This template also helps you understand which type of post performs better and which gives less results.
Finally, it guides you to turn this data into substantial improvements for your corporate social media strategy.
Social Media Audit for Companies: a 5-step guide
Take the template you have chosen to use and, if you use a social management tool, prepare the data you will need for the audit.
Now you can begin. Here is our brief 5-step guide. That is, the one recommended by a social media agency.
Step 1. Roll call of all your profiles on social media platforms.
List all company social profiles, even those you use little or not at all.
For each, transcribe the username, URL, fanbase size, engagement rate or other relevant KPIs;
Step 2. Evaluate the engagement rate for each profile
Engagement rate or engagement rate is one of the most widely used metrics to determine the performance of a post, campaign or, in this case, a profile.
Unlike the number of followers, which is a vanity metric, engagement rate gives you useful information about how the community interacts with you.
It then marks the engagement rate for each profile in the template and also details the impression and reach data for the top posts.
Step 3. Identify common patterns
Now that you have collected enough data on the top-performing posts, try to identify what patterns or patterns they have in common. Are they photos? Are they videos? How is the caption copy written? Etc.
If there are common elements, you have found part of your recipe for an engaging post;
Step 4. Define your goals for each social media account
Your social media marketing strategy should include sub-strategies for all the platforms you use.
So you will have an Instagram strategy, a Facebook social strategy, etc.
Each strategy is aimed at achieving a goal.
So set some SMART goals (specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and time-bound=for each profile you use.
Step 5. Review social strategy, plan and experiment
Now that you’ve completed the data collection part of your Audit, it’s time to get down to business.
The information you’ve collected needs to be turned into actions that improve your social strategy.
In general, you can use what emerged from the Audit to:
- Continue to work on the strengths of your social media marketing strategy;
- mitigate weaknesses, which did not lead to the expected results;
- Renew your social media presence. The social universe is constantly evolving, and you can experiment with new platforms if you believe they will help you to
- Achieve other business goals.
The benefits of a periodic Social Audit
We have described the irons of the trade and the steps to follow, but we have not yet said why you should conduct the Audit from time to time.
Repeating this periodically (e.g., every 3, 4, or 6 months) allows you to always have an up-to-date snapshot of your social profiles, especially in terms of performance and results.
If the strategy is working, you will have the right information to continue to grow, isolating mistakes and strengthening the factors that determine your success.
If your social strategy is not working, however, thanks to the data revealed by the Audit you can correct your course.
In this case, scheduling a periodic Audit is especially beneficial because you can intercept critical issues and correct them before they become a problem.
One last piece of advice we feel like giving you is to always experiment with new ideas and don’t be afraid to be daring with creativity, even by taking AB Tests.
If you do something new you can fail, but if you don’t try you can’t progress and differentiate yourself.
The Audit is a lifesaver in this regard, to take reasoned risks, mitigate the effects of a bad strategy and enhance the pluses of a performing social media marketing strategy.
Social media audit FAQ
A social media audit is used to:
– Assess the effectiveness of current social strategy
– Identify strengths and weaknesses of social presence
– Analyze the performance of published content
– Compare with competitors
– Obtain insights to improve future strategy
The social media audit is useful for:
– Companies who want to optimize their social presence
– Social media managers who take on new clients
– Marketers who want to analyze competitors
– Any brand who want to improve their performance on social
– Entertainment people, Politicians and Athletes who want to monitor their reputation on Social
It is important to conduct a social media audit to:
– Have a clear and objective view of your social situation
– Identify opportunities for improvement
– Better allocate resources and budget
– Align social strategy with business objectives
– Measure ROI of social media activities
Some of the most widely used tools for conducting a social media audit are:
– Sprout Social
– Hootsuite
– Buffer
– BuzzSumo
– Brand24
– Analisa
– NapoleonCat
– HypeAuditor
These tools offer analytics, monitoring and reporting capabilities for in-depth analysis of social media performance.
Do you want to learn more about Social Media Marketing? Read these articles:
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