The social media landscape is ever-shifting, therefore new channels, communities, and tools should be anticipated. What this implies is that there are always fresh opportunities to use this medium to work for your company. If you operate a business, you need to know how to use social media effectively as a promotional and advertising medium.
The process, however, cannot be carried out in a vacuum, without some form of oversight or evaluation. It’s crucial to monitor the results of your social media efforts to see what’s helping and what’s hurting your organisation.
Define social media audit
An audit of your social media accounts will show you how effective (or ineffective) they are for your company. To assess the efficacy of your present social media tactics, you should conduct an audit. Factors like as population size, percentage of audience participation, geographic reach, and the success of previous campaigns are all part of these measurements.
The number of views, number of comments, number of likes, number of shares, most-engaged-with articles, and most-engaged-with audience may all be part of a social media audit. You may utilise this information to improve your company’s social media marketing strategies.
A Guide to Conducting a Social Media Audit
Just because you’re starting from fresh doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn anything from your social media audit. To jumpstart your work, use templates or samples. As such, you should be ready to do extensive research and analysis. We’ll go through what must be done to conduct a social media audit in the following sections.
Get back to the fundamentals
Gather up all of your company’s social media profiles, even if you haven’t used them in a while or haven’t updated them. You should keep track of your platform’s URL, your username, the amount of subscribers and followers you have, your engagement metrics, and any other key performance indicators (KPIs) that may apply.
Compare the activity on each profile
Most social networking sites also include analytics tools that may be quite useful in assessing your audience and your activity. Keep track of your impressions, reach, and engagement rates on each platform separately. Using this information, you can see the benefits and drawbacks of each platform for your company.
Seek out the trends
Now that you know which posts performed well on each platform, you can look for patterns. Examine the similarities and differences between the most shared content on various social media sites. Inspect the post’s format, audience, date/time, and medium.
You should be able to identify these trends in your audience’s engagement with your business when you examine the data you’ve gathered. How much of your website’s traffic comes from each platform specifically? From what do the highest levels of participation emerge? To what extent does a specific age group typically interact with a given topic? You can start to make sense of these recurring themes in the data.
Establish targets for each channel
Now that you know where you are with each of your social media accounts, it’s time to make some changes. Also think about the things that are working well that you may exploit further. To be meaningful, these objectives must focus on more than merely expanding fan base size.
In order to maximized the potential of social media for your company, you should set objectives related to things like expanding your customer base, fostering brand loyalty, and attracting new visitors to your website. To learn more about how to establish objectives for your social media marketing efforts, watch the above video.
Plan beforehand
The process of gathering information for your social media audit is extensive. But it isn’t meant to be a diversion from what it’s for. The purpose of the audit is to assist you identify areas of improvement in your social media strategy. Create a strategy to reach your goals when you have finished the audit and identified them.
Analyze emerging mediums
It’s possible that your company is focusing too much on a few platforms and neglecting others. If you think there’s more opportunity elsewhere, or if you just want to broaden your horizons, then by all means, do so.
The data you’ve gathered should be used to determine the best distribution channels for your content. Also, you should do social media audits periodically so that you can quickly monitor your progress with any new projects.