What is a Social Media Audit & why is it necessary?
Social Media Audit is part of the social media marketing strategy that needs to be performed periodically and is the first step for analyzing and reviewing your social media marketing strategy. Social media audit is the process of conducting checks on the following points for social media optimization of your business and to meet your social media objectives.
- Checking on duplicate profiles
- Checking on inappropriate content on social media
- To make sure all your posts and interactions are appropriate & engaging enough, this helps in driving traffic to your site or shopping on social media itself and that leads to new reach, conversion & sales.
- Social media presence audit
- Content audit
- Engagement audit
- Analytics audit
And these are the first few steps in audit towards optimizing your social media presence. However the above points are part of a four level audit process that covers. Presence, Content, Engagement & Social media analytics Audit.
Why is Social media Audit required ?
Audit helps you to analyze & form a better strategy to improve on the strategic & operational loop holes. Research indicates that social media can keep connected, but it also has the potential to alienate. It’s imperative for organizations to stay on top of social platform in terms of reach & connectedness. As businesses are now using multiple social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn as their main source of advertising with Facebook being the most popular by far. Their focus is on creating, repurposing & automating the content distribution according to the annual social media marketing calendar. And this might deteriorate the overall social media marketing strategy that slowly stagnates the growth on social media.
The other reason for this stagnant growth could be duplicate profiles & inappropriate content on social media that hampers the growth.
Hence to avoid this by generating new set of audience frequently & to enhance the companies brand image, reach, survey quality & feedback. It becomes necessary for the businesses to conduct a quarterly social media audit and improvise their annual calendars based on strategic audit analysis report.
What does social media audit report consist of ?
Social media audit report consist of the following
The social media audit report consist of four main parts, Presence, Content, Engagement, and Analytics that creates a complete social media audit. We will go through each one of them as they are interdependent. It means the type of content you produce is platform dependent and it impacts the way you engage and analyze.
Social Media Presence Audit : With the increasing no of social media channels, it gets difficult to keep up with the trend, however being present early is leveraging a first mover advantage as you have uncontested access to your target group. Hence to identify this opportunity by focusing on new trends and getting riddance of old social media channels that are not trending and showing decline among your target group is saving lot of time, money & efforts. For e.g. this is what the Hubspot report says on new social media channels for 2022. This helps you analyze and predict your social media spend.
To check on duplicate social media profiles and inappropriate content on each channel is a task as you might be losing your target audience to those fake profiles.That dilute your brand image and stagnates your growth.
Content Audit: One way to gauge how well you’re doing is to check out what other companies who have been around longer than you are posting on Facebook. Does your company post higher quality photos (pictures vs. quotes) at a rate more in line with industry standards? Are they providing enough information about themselves and their products/services? Is their tone consistent across every type of page? Read through our article on Creating Quality Content if you want to get some ideas for great content. Following are the points that can be analysed through content analysis.
- Check for branding across all your content (Logo, Forms, Fonts, watermarks etc)
- Content relevant to the social media channel with right keywords, bio, social profile about section & all the tabs.
- Eliminate the content that is not serving the purpose & not adding a value from all of your social media platforms, this effects the overall brand strategy.
- In case of e-commerce site, remove images of product that are old and cant be reproduced as your social media account works as a catalogue for new orders from old products. especially in case of made to order products.
- Check on duplicate profiles and inappropriate content as this dilutes the brand image and creates confusion for users
Engagement Audit: This is tricky, when it comes to social media optimization, no or low engagement might not always be the content problem. It can be any of the following points that can be checked through engagement audit or the social analytics audit that we will cover after this.
- Check on schedule, Interval & frequency of post. This needs to be consistent for growth & engagement.
- Check lead capturing mechanism & form length, eliminate unnecessary fields and capture necessary as required.
- Check appropriate CTA & Landing pages on content with shareability & comment options are provided to followers
- Check on the response mechanism to the comments & queries of your followers
- Check the chatbot script & query resolution on social media
Social Analytics Audit: The most important of all, when we talk about analytics, we’re talking about tracking metrics that covers demographics, engagement, conversion and sales generated through social media content for analysis. As these visits & conversions are the events that generate ROI for your social media efforts through remarketing. You need to be accurate about your data source and to know that it is being captured correctly through right resources.
If your analytics numbers from social media are not yielding great results. Then before improving your content and engagement part of the audit report, check what needs to be corrected on your social analytics report that captures and shares a data.
If the UTM parameters, pixels & events settings are not correct then your best performing content & engagement will not show correct data.
- Check for Pixel duplication or right pixel tracking in case of multiple pixels and make a note of it, so that it remains constant
- Check for duplication of triggered events
- Check for conversion event set up that captures the conversion events on your social media channel
- Check UTM parameters on your social links to track click attribution
- Track links that receive the most clicks to analyse the CTA & content that is attention grabing & clickable. Link optimization helps you in calculating your ROI of your individual posts and social media campaigns
- Link optimization is key to assessing the ROI of your individual posts and social efforts at large
- Look for a better analytics tool that is easy to use and captures all of the data that is required for social media optimization. For e.g. data that gives details of your target audience demographics, device, best time to post, etc. and this can be of a great help for your paid advertisements and display campaigns.
A fundamental part of any social media campaign is setting goals so you can measure if it’s working or not. And setting up social media analytics is frequently skipped as it is a frustrating job for marketers. However to optimize social media performance without setting correct analytics is possible but not effective and might not yield result.
Conclusion – The benefit of conducting a social media audit is four fold.
- First, helps you create a better brand image
- Second, helps you increase your organic reach by capturing correct data
- Third, helps you save money, time & efforts by eliminating your redundant content that is inappropriate, identifying duplication of events & pixels that captures a wrong data for analysis
- Fourth, It detects & gives report on duplicate profiles on right social media channels that helps in regaining growth. It also helps in identifying alternate & underlying social media opportunities for leveraging growth on new social media channels that are upcoming & trending.
And this is how social media audit helps in social media optimization and is the first step towards optimizing social media.
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