Before you (or your business) can go viral online, you need a social media strategy. To get a social media strategy that actually converts, you need to get a better understanding of “where you’re at today” – or a social media audit, in “marketing terms.”
A social media audit is the first step to truly understanding how your channels are performing, and where to invest more of your time for a bigger return. Think of it as your guiding compass.
Even if you’re just starting out and don’t have social media, you should still start your strategy with a social media audit. Instead of looking where you’ve been, you would look closely at your branding for consistency, what your competitors have been doing and practice social listening. (If you’re not sure what social listening is, check out our blog here.)
In this blog, we explain what a social media audit is, how to perform one, and how to use it to create a social media strategy that supports your overall sales funnel.
What Is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a formal review of your or your brand’s entire social media presence. It includes every channel you use for online social interactions with your audience. It could include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest or any other channels you’re active on.
You’re looking for:
- Any branding (in)consistencies
- To understand what types of engagement you’re getting and where
- Which channels are doing the heavy lifting
- Which posts are performing best (building trust with your audience)
- Which posts are flopping (not connecting with your audience)
- Your audience demographics
The goal of social media is to support your marketing funnel by being the place where you can reach your potential customers, connect with your audience, or build an online community. Don’t make the mistake of thinking social media doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Each post is a brick that helps build your brand’s personality, and your audience’s trust.
After performing this audit, you will better understand where you need to spend more time developing, which areas are having the most positive impact on your audience (so you can focus more there next quarter), and who your customers are and what they like and don’t like. All of this is critical information that helps you build out your social media strategy.
What is a Social Media Audit?
When you’re looking at the areas in the above list, you want to gather as much data as possible. The more detail you can collect, the better you can paint a picture of how your social media presence has been working to move your customers through your marketing funnel.
Check these things:
- Is branding consistent across all channels? Your customers should immediately recognize your brand voice no matter where they’re reading it.
- Are you verified, and will being verified matter to your audience? Being verified on social media confirms that the account belongs to the real person, brand, or organization it represents. This provides an additional layer of trust for your audience.
- What is your posting cadence and frequency?
- What is your current follower count? (This helps to give you a benchmark for growth.)
- What are your audience demographics?
- What is the average engagement rate?
- What type of engagement do you get the most and from where? Likes, comments, shares, saves, etc.
- What are the top performing posts? Dig into these to understand why they resonated so well with your followers. Then, recreate that feeling in your next posts.
- What is the main goal of the channel and KPIs to measure if you’re hitting that goal?
- Any other benchmarks you can work off for future planning?
- Competitor analysis. Look up 3 to 4 of your closest competitors and analyze what they’ve been doing on social. What’s working for them? What failed? Listen to their audience.
You’re looking to understand if there are any roadblocks preventing you from reaching more of your audience on social media. When you find them, look at these as opportunities to dissect them and learn. Your team should analyze problems and provide recommendations to resolve them, maybe research how to improve social media engagement. Keep note of what you’re doing well and the community sentiment. You can also add challenges and opportunities, depending on how deep you want the audit to be.
What Value do You Get From an Audit?
A quality, thorough audit paints a picture of your social media footprint. In other words, it helps you see where you’ve been so you can plan strategically where to go next (instead of just winging it and/or following empty trends). Maybe LinkedIn performs better than Facebook, but you’ve been investing more time into Facebook. This could mean your audience is looking for more longform content, or connecting more with the topics you’re posting there. Be where your audience is! You can build this into your strategy moving forward.
Having clear data to measure against your goals helps you get proof of ROI, which, whether you’re a business owner or a mid-level marketer, you know is critical! This might look like reaching your views/impressions KPIs if your goal is more brand awareness.
Start by Knowing Where You’ve Been
Every good social media strategy starts by looking into where you are today, and how you got there. Or, as we formally like to call it, a social media audit! Every post, reaction and comment (even the negative ones, if you happen to get one) are insights into who your audience is and what they want. This information can help you shape how you voice your brand on socials to connect with them more. The more you connect with your audience, the more you learn about them, which leads to higher conversions.
If you need help performing your audit, building a winning (maybe even viral!) strategy and staying consistent with your online presence, we’d love to partner with you. Connect with us to start a conversation.
