How to successfully conduct a social media audit

When starting a social media campaign you have two choices: work with what you’ve got or start anew. It can be difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your strategy. The best way to follow up on a social media strategy is to perform a social media audit. This is a process where you review your current social media strategy to see what’s working and what isn’t. You can perform audits as often as you like, with monthly or quarterly audits being the most common. The more audits you complete, the easier the process is. Follow these steps to perform your own perfect audit and getting the most out of your social media strategy.

Step 1: Create a social media audit spreadsheet

Conducting a social media audit starts with organisation. The easiest way to collect all the information you need is in a spreadsheet. You can easily find free templates online or create your own. The basics you need for your audit spreadsheet are:

• Profile Information – username, URL etc.
• Audience demographics
• Publishing metrics (how much of each content type you are posting)
• Engagement rates
• Channel specific metrics for each social platform auditing

For each metric you measure, be sure to include the percentage change from the previous month (or previous audit). To make the spreadsheet easier to read, have a summary page with individual tabs for each social platform you want to investigate. The metrics will be different for each platform, so alter your spreadsheet accordingly.

Step 2: Check that your branding is consistent

Now that you’ve found all of your accounts, it’s time to check that they all reflect your branding. Go through every account and make sure that it’s recognisably you and not someone else’s account that has the same name. This also makes your brand trustworthy online. Your followers will want to know that they’re really following you and not a fake or unofficial account. Check that your bio, photos and handle all match across platforms to ensure a completely consistent look.

Step 3: Collect your data

The most important tip here is to check ALL of your accounts. You may know your popular profiles, but you might have a rogue Pinterest account you weren’t aware of. You can use a website such as Namechk to find all the accounts under your brand’s name. It also shows available platforms if you wanted to branch out into new social media territory. Make a list of all of your social profiles before you start, so you don’t miss anything out. Once you have everything written down, decide which accounts to focus on and collect all of your relevant data.

Step 4: Identify your top performing posts

This is a vital step. It shows what your audience is loving and what they want to see more of. You can adapt your current strategy to include more of this content to make it more relevant to your audience. You can also categorise your top posts into different sections, such as:

• Videos
• Photos
• Promotional
• Educational

Once you have your top-performing posts, you can add more of that content into your next calendar.

Step 5: Find your audience

It’s always good to know your audience in more detail, so take this time to fully analyse who your followers are. This will help you successfully conduct a social media audit. Most social platforms give you in-depth details about your audience. By putting them into this spreadsheet form you are able to easily compare audiences across platforms to see what you need to alter. Some simple demographics to note are:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Timezone (for knowing when to schedule posts for)
• Device used

You can go into as much detail as you have time for.

Step 6: Adjust your goals

The whole point of a social media audit is to find out what isn’t working so that you can change it. Use all of your new-found data to adjust your campaign to include more of the good content and less of the content that doesn’t work. Make sure that all of your goals are SMART: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-specific The best way to get effective goals is to complete a SWOT analysis for each platform, but this is just one way to create your goals. Once you’ve got your new goals you can start preparing for your new effective social media campaign which uses your data to promote the best parts of your content strategy. We hope that you now know how to successfully conduct a social media audit and make positive changes to your business.