Marketers need to invest in the appropriate platforms and provide the right content to reach and engage the right audience in a world where the typical internet user has 8.5 social media accounts.
An assessment of your brand’s social media presence will help it prosper.
In in this essay, we will discuss
Definition of a social media audit
Reasons for their significance
The 7-Step Process for Doing a Successful Social Media Audit
Why Is It Necessary To Do A Social Media Audit?
An audit of your existing social media presence may be thought of as a stock take.
Social media marketers evaluate the success (or failure) of their social strategy by examining a variety of indicators, just as a store owner could track which items sell the best, where to place the products on the shelves, and how much to charge for them.
- Click-through rate, comments, and likes
- Impressions
- Shares
You want to figure out which of your postings is getting the most attention, and why. Do they represent the target audience? Do they fit the profile of your perfect customer?
An audit of your social media accounts should provide you with the information you need to:
Top-performing social media channels
When and where each medium fits into the buyer’s journey
Those who follow you on social media (and how it varies across different platforms)
When it comes to generating interest, what kinds of material are most effective?
What kinds of information fare best on each system
All of that information (and more) can help you direct your time and resources where they will do the most good. What this means in practical terms is increased activity, a larger audience, and higher earnings.
Actions to Take Before Doing a Social Media Audit
Are you prepared to conduct your first social media audit? Here are the seven steps you need to do to make it happen:
Compile all of the social media profiles that are associated with your brand.
Locating your many online profiles should be your initial action. It may not be as easy as it seems because of:
Brand impersonating websites
Your marketing department’s old, unused test accounts
Establishing separate social media profiles for various departments or divisions of a company
You’ll have to manually enter your brand name into each platform’s search bar if you want to find your numerous accounts quickly.
Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can keep an eye out for mentions of your business online and alert you if new (or fake) accounts pop up without your awareness.
Set High-Level and Platform-Level Objectives
It’s important to take a step back and assess your motivations before delving into your present performance levels.
For this example, we’ll focus on the objective of increasing sales. Okay, but what do you hope social media will accomplish to help you reach that objective? Is it your intention to:
Get in front of potential consumers at the beginning of the sales process?
Have fun with your current clientele to get them to buy from you again?
How about using social commerce to boost your profile-based sales?
Inspire your audience to take action with your brand’s content?
Or perhaps something else?
It’s important to remember that your goals on each social media site may be different.
Let’s look at TikTok as an example. With 49% of users describing the site as a source for discovering something new and 29% using it to gain inspiration, it is an useful top-of-the-funnel marketing tool.
Instagram, on the other hand, seems to play a stronger role at the end of the sales funnel, with 44% of consumers using the platform to shop regularly and 28% using Instagram to plan their Instagram-based purchasing activities.
Hence, if you only ever utilised those two platforms, you might want to:
Take use of TikTok to reach a wider audience and educate them about your business and products.
Use Instagram’s Shopping tab and product tags to get quick revenue.
Not only that, but you already know that your viewers will shift from platform to platform. Continuing with the previous instances, the greatest demographic of Instagram users is between the ages of 25 and 34, whereas the same demographic on TikTok is between the ages of 18 and 24. As the viewers on each platform may act differently, you can’t assume that using the same social media approach would be effective in reaching them.
Check the Brand Consistency of Each Account
Bear in mind that the typical internet user maintains close to nine different profiles.
It implies there’s a decent shot your following, and especially your most devoted clients, will stick with you when you branch out into other media.
What’s the big deal, anyway?
For the simple reason that you need each profile to read like an organic expansion of your brand. If you just post caustic memes on Twitter and genuine mindfulness posts on Instagram, you run the risk of confusing and alienating your audience. Verify that all of your accounts are in sync with one another regarding:
- Brand emblems
- Picture covers (if relevant)
- Personal and social media profiles
- Account verification (i.e., does every profile have that reassuring blue checkmark?)
- Links to the landing page (do all accounts send visitors to the same page?)
Explore Your Most Successful Articles
It’s time to start analysing the numbers now.
If this is your first social media audit, you should go back at least a year to get a good picture of your profiles’ performance.
- Influence and impact
- Metrics for Participation and Involvement (i.e., comments, likes, shares)
- Age distribution of your fan base, for example. In what part of the world do they reside?)
- User preferences (what are the five most popular postings on each platform, for example)