Spring Cleaning! 6 Basic Steps To Run A Social Media Audit 2019

04 Apr Spring Cleaning! 6 Basic Steps To Run A Social Media Audit 2019

There is never really a wrong time to run a social media audit. Feeling like your social media presence has gone stale, or not seeing the results you’d like can be a good indicator that it’s time to re-visit what you’ve been doing and take an inventory of your social media presence. Here’s a look at the system I follow to conduct social media audits.

1. List All The Social Media Networks You’re On

Step one in any audit, is to take a look at what you’re already doing. So we’ll start by looking at the social media networks you’re currently on. To get started make a list of all the social media networks you’re currently on. You can jot it down on paper or create an excel sheet – whichever works best for you.

2. Analyze

Analyzing each social network will probably be the most tedious part of this social media audit process. But in order to clean up your social media efforts you’ll have to know how each network is performing. Some key stats to consider are:

1. Traffic the social network is driving to your website
2. Sales that can be attributed to each social media network
3. Newsletter sign ups from social media
4. The size and engagement rate of each social media network

All this will help you understand where your audience engages the most (and will come in handy with the next step).  Take this a step further and determine how each of your active social media networks perform individually. Some key stats to take a look at are:

1. 1. Follower number
   2. Reach/Impressions
   3. Engagements and engagement rates (likes, comments, RTs, mentions etc)
   4. Top posts
   5. Lowest performing posts

If you’ve been keeping track of these stats consistently, these numbers shouldn’t be too time consuming to look up and gather. With my agency clients, we do use third party tools to keep track of analytics such as Agorapulse and Later, but we also keep track of stats available on the networks manually using analytics tracker templates we’ve created. This may feel redundant, but I’m a creature of habit and taking a periodic inventory makes you look at stats consistently and you’re able to spot trends in engagement sooner. You’ll also want to take a look at your benchmarks and goals to see if you’re on track to reach these as your social media marketing strategy stands.

3. Assign A Value To The Social Media Networks You’re On

Assigning a value to each social media network your brand is active on is a big part of your social media Spring cleaning. This will you determine where you should spend more time, determine where any budget should go, and can even help you figure out your customer journey. Although social media tracking can be difficult (interactions are hardly ever direct) you can get some tools and technologies in place to help you figure this out. You can estimate a value for each network by using tracked links, network specific codes, or even a simple dropdown question along the lines of “where did you learn about us” to help you figure out where your conversions are coming from.

Another piece to keep in mind is again how much time you spend on creating content, interacting and up-keeping each social media network.

4. Decide Which Networks To Keep

Taking into consideration which networks seem to be working for your brand you can decide to keep all your social media profiles or to get rid of some. Remember that you don’t necessarily need to be on every network – so don’t be afraid to let go of the ones that aren’t working. According to Pew Research Center survey the most used social networks by Americans in 2019 so far are:

1. 1. YouTube (73% of American adults use)
   2. Facebook (69%)
   3. Instagram (37%)
   4. Pinterest (28%)
   5. LinkedIn (27%)
   6. Snapchat (24%)
   7. Twitter (22%)
   8. WhatsApp (20%)

Social media network popularity is not always a good indicator that it will work for your brand. This list for example does not show TikTok, although the network is rising in popularity among younger users. Think about your target audience, where your audience “hangs out”, take your industry and niche into consideration as well. Remember that there are so many micro-networking sites they could be active on.

5. Clean Up Profiles

After you decide which networks are worth keeping you can move on to cleaning up your profiles. Take a look at your biographies, any links, profile and header images. Make sure everything is up to date and that your images are high quality. Bonus: If you have any upcoming initiatives think about how you can utilize your headers to drive extra traffic to these!

6. Revisit Your Analytics To Adjust Your Strategy

Okay so now let’s take a step back. After you’ve reviewed what profile changes you have to make you can revisit the stats you gathered, including goals and benchmarks and determine if you need to adjust your strategy. Here is where the big picture for your brand comes into play. Perhaps you notice you get a lot of likes on Instagram, but not too many comments – so you have to work on engagement. Maybe your Facebook posts are getting good reach, but not as many click throughs. Take a look at trends in your engagement and points in time where your account was doing well. What were you doing different? Are there any pieces you’re missing or would like to improve? Keep strategies that work and stop doing the ones that don’t.

Part of this step is to set new goals and benchmarks.

This part of your social media audit requires work as well. If you set any goals – did you reach them? If not, why? Was there a particular campaign or social media network that did really well or sent the most traffic to your site?

If you haven’t set benchmarks now is a good time. Take an average of your impressions, downloads driven from social media, traffic sent from social media to your site etc. for a period of time (usually the last 3 -6 months. If your info doesn’t go that far back, find a time frame that makes sense for your brand). This average is your benchmark of how your account is performing. From here, and based on the answers to the types of questions you answered before about performance, you can begin to set new goals. This could be anything from increase membership by 10% month to month, to making it a goal to run three promotions a year because you realize you haven’t run enough of them

Remember to follow metrics that make sense to your business.

Some things to integrate into your strategy if you aren’t already:

Remember it’s all about engaging your current audience: Social media networks have seen so many shifts in the last year – especially when it comes to organic reach. My best advice is to simply concentrate on the audience you already have. Serve them value, get them to talk to you, go out and engage with them, join their conversations. In a world of algorithms, getting who your current audience to engage with you will unlock the doors to organic reach. If you show the algorithm your tribe loves you it will show your content to more people.

Use videos and live videos: Videos are getting the most reach and interaction online – so try to integrate these into your social media strategy. You can use live videos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and repurpose them for extra exposure once you’re done.

Create an Instagram Stories strategy: For a boost to your Instagram presence get used to using Instagram Stories. Stories offer big opportunities for extra exposure and engagement with tools like Stickers, location tagging and most recently the ability to follow hashtags.

BONUS: While you’re auditing and spring cleaning your social media channels, take some time to clean out your email list and get rid of inactive members.

A social media audit is a great way to keep your strategies fresh and your accounts growing. Have you conducted an audit on your social channels? I’ve created a Social Media Audit Checklist and added it to my Resource Library. Sign up to the library here to gain access to the audit checklist and many more free resources!

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If you need help with an audit for you social media presence or social media strategy lets chat! Contact me here.

P.S. Be sure to check out the DhariLo Social Media Lounge membership program here.