Social Media Audits

What exactly is a social media audit?

A social media audit will help you determine where you currently stand with your social media strategy. By doing a social media audit, you will learn what is working and/or not working with your current social strategy. 

This audit will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as help you find new opportunities for your business. You will analyze key metrics, which will let you see what types of posts your audience responds to best, as well as learn general information about your audience demographics, etc. Above all, you will also take a look inside your competitors’ performance to see what is working for them and to potentially improve your own performance as well as potentially find inspiration for future content.

In addition, we created a social media audit template that should help you easily run an audit in less than 30 min!

Template: Social Media Audit Template

A social media audit will help you:

• Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Make sure your brand is represented consistently across all social media platforms.
• Measure how your brand performs across your social media channels.
• Analyze your competitors, noting their strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s how we conduct a social media audit:

1. List All of Your Social Media Platforms
2. Check Your Social Accounts
3. Look at Your Content Analytics from Each Social Profile
4. Analyze Your Audience on Social Media
5. Social Listening Analysis
6. Calculate Your ROI
7. Research Your Competitors
8. Set New Social Media Objectives
9. Establish Key Metrics
10.  Conduct Your Social Media Audit Regularly

1. List All of Your Social Media Platforms

You can easily do this by creating a spreadsheet and list out all of the social media profiles you have. We recommend also searching for your business name to make sure there are not any fake or unauthorized accounts that you may need to be worried about. This is also a way to see if there are any old accounts that you no longer use and that should be deleted.

Here is an example of what we would add:

1. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/triadmarketingsolutions/
2. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/triadmrkting/
3. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/triad-marketing-solutions/
4. Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/triadmarketing/

This is another way to identify accounts that may not bring any value to your business or are no longer relevant to the public, so you can assess if you should keep them or focus on the accounts that matter.

2. Check Your Social Accounts

Now that you have all of your accounts listed, you can begin to check each to make sure that all the information is correct on each profile. That could be your contact information, relevant links, and other information, such as business hours and business information.

Some things you should check here are:

1. Handles – Make sure your customers can find you easily on social media, this means your handle should include your business name.
2. Profile/Cover pictures – The images used here should be relevant to your industry and that represent your business correctly, by containing branded elements like your logo, colors, and/or tagline.
3. Bio – Since most social media platforms offer limited space for your bio, you need to make the most of it. Make sure that you fill in all fields that your audience may need to know, like where to find you, how to contact you, and what you do.
4. Links – If links are available, you should use them. However, update your links so that they showcase your most recent or relevant products.

3. Look at Your Content Analytics from Each Social Profile

You can do this by looking through your analytics. Look through to find patterns and to see what made different posts perform better than others. Look at impressions, post reach, clicks, likes, comments, and shares.

A few questions you can ask are:

• Did you include a question in the copy?
• Did you use an image or a video?
• Did you use any specific keywords or hashtags?
• At what time and on which day was it posted?

You should include these metrics in your content analysis:

• Posting frequency
• Average post engagement
• Average post reach
• Conversions
• Referral traffic

4. Analyze Your Audience on Social Media

Another aspect of conducting a social media audit is to understand your audience. With today’s platforms, you are able to see the location, age, and gender of your audience. This information, combined with the content analysis you just did, will help you also understand what works best for your followers.

You should include these metrics in your audience analysis:

• Audience demographics
• Number of followers
• Monthly follower growth

5. Social Listening Analysis

Learning what people think about your business is very important. You can do this by going through your business’s reviews, messages, comments, and mentions in order to gauge an idea of how your audience sees you. 

6. Calculate Your ROI

If you spent any money on paid social ads, this is where you can find out your Return on Investment (ROI). 

Look at any paid social ads you may have run, to see which ones generated the most traffic, leads, and/or conversions. You can also look at any increase in traffic or followers that occurred during or after the campaign. 

You then divide the amount of revenue generated through your ads by the amount you spent in running the ads, in other words, your ROI. This way, you can see where the money you spent on ads went and if those campaigns were beneficial and/if they can be improved.

7. Research Your Competitors

It’s also important that you spend some time researching your competitors. This is a great way to gain inspiration for content ideas, post formats, etc. We suggest creating a section that has the following information:

In this section of the audit, you can include the following information:

• Competitor name
• Social media channels
• Followers
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Posting Frequency
• Average Post Engagement
• Most Popular Content 
• Additional Notes

8. Set New Social Media Objectives

With a better understanding of your own social media account activity as well as your competitors, now is the time to set new marketing goals. This is a great time to do just that because you have a clear idea of where you stand and what you want to ultimately achieve.

In the world of marketing, we tend to follow S.M.A.R.T. objectives. This means:

• Specific – What exactly do you want to achieve?
• Measurable – How are you going to measure your progress?
• Attainable – Is this objective realistic?
• Relevant – Is this objective relevant to your business needs?
• Time-based – How much time is it going to take you to reach your goal?

When answering these questions, you should gain a better understanding of what you need to do in order to achieve these goals/objectives.

9. Key Metrics

Once you have decided on what goals you want to achieve in regards to your marketing strategy, you should then establish key metrics that you will monitor so you can easily tell if your social strategy is working or not. We call these metrics KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Some of the main KPIs you should track with your social media performance are:

• Engagement
• Shares
• Number of mentions
• Impressions
• Referral traffic
• Clicks on links
• Social media reach

10. Conduct Your Social Media Audit Regularly

You should consistently be checking your own social media stats as well as your competitors. Since the landscape of social media is constantly changing, you also must stay abreast of what is working and what is not. This is also important because trends come and go, as well as the popularity of certain social platforms.

You can conduct this audit monthly – at least quarterly – so you can stay updated on your overall strategy, ensuring your time, effort, and money are spent wisely.

Also, it is wise to constantly check your reach, engagement, and conversion KPIs to monitor your social media performance. 

Experiment with new social media platforms, post types, and posting patterns, while finding the best content mix for your audience.

Next Steps

Using our social media audit template, you can begin this audit today! Although at first, it may seem intimidating, once you complete it the first time, it will become easier over time!

Template: Social Media Audit Template

At Triad Marketing Solutions, we aim to help small businesses obtain a presence in the ever changing digital landscape. If you are interested in having a professional social media audit conducted, contact us today! We would be happy to help!