Why Audit Your Social Media?
How do you know your social media strategy is working? You check your data. Data alone can tell you whether all the work you’ve put into creating your strategy and content is worth it.
The future of social media is uncertain; a new social media network could pop up tomorrow. Facebook and Instagram can become obsolete. Auditing your social media will help you future-proof your strategy.
Here’s what you need to do:
10 Steps to Auditing Your Social Media
1. Gather data from each digital property you own.
Now is the time to find and list the social media accounts that you use or the company that you work for has been using. The work does not stop here, there might be old accounts that you had left at some point; now would be a fantastic opportunity to bring them back into the play.
2. Analyze metrics from each digital property.
By looking at key performance indicator (KPIs) of your social media accounts, it will let you about know the impressions of your social media accounts as well as the engagement and can also give useful information about the ad spend. For proper analyzing of your social media accounts, there needs to be an analytic system that can do the job for you. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram have their own analytic system that makes it very easy for you to analyze your performance on various social media accounts.
3. Find your best performing posts from each network.
This is one of the most important steps for auditing your social media strategy because it lets you know about the kind of content your audience is drawn towards. It is not just the content type that you should be looking at but also makes sure to properly assess what exactly is it about that post that is making them so popular. Is it the high quality of the picture which makes it nice to look it or is it a certain philosophical quote that people can relate to emotionally. Make sure to go into the depth of the reasons.
4. Find your most shared posts from each network.
Now we are looking for the post that had the most engagement in terms of sharing over the various social media platforms. Once you find the posts, it is time to analyze the reason behind its popularity. Did you upload a video whereas you had been posting photos before or was it another photo whose content was what people appreciated? Take time to look if there other posts like this one and if they received the same kind of attention and if not try to figure out the reason behind i
5. Double-check your branding.
Now is a good time for you to be looking at how you or your company is being portrayed to the audience. The way that your branding has been done, is it connecting with the audience or are they against you or the company you work for? If there is no connection with the audience it is time to change your branding in ways that better appeal to your audience.
6. Refresh your bios across all networks.
Bios are of the first thing that an audience sees when they visit your page; hence it needs to be attention-grabbing and promising. Spend time on it, make it catchy and make it relevant to your brand across all the social media platform
7. Create a customer profile from your metrics.
Doing this will help you to see how your audience most comprises of. It will give their demographic as well as geographic distributions as well as their interests. It can help you post content that suits more to your audience.
8. Research other networks.
Researching other networks will keep you motivated and more competitive. It can also give you information about networks that are most popular and you can implement an idea from their networks.
9. Take into account what your ad spending vs. your ROI.
Make sure to evaluate how ad spending is helping your accounts and the effect it is producing on your overall profit.
10. Re-evaluate your SMART Goals.
Do this so that you are constantly working to achieve your objectives and see if you’re able to meet the goals that have been set previously. Work on setting goals that are more short term and can be achieved, don’t make them too hard.