What Is a Social Media Audit?
When you conduct a social media audit, you collect and analyze detailed data from all of your social media accounts. You look closely at your activity, results, audience, and financial investments (including ad spend).
Ultimately, you want to find out if your social media efforts are relevant to your current objectives and goals. Do you still have a Facebook group for an old subscription-based coaching program that you no longer run? Have you pinned posts to send users to your latest landing pages? An audit can help you pinpoint these details.
#1: Measure Overall Results
The first step in your audit is to compile all of the social media metrics you can to evaluate your overall results. These metrics include:
- Number of followers
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Clicks
- Video views
- Number of followers
- Post reach
- Number of mentions (Twitter)
Get into the details when analyzing these metrics. Take a close look at how they compare on different types of posts, too. Do you get more engagement from Facebook when you tag influencers than when you share blog posts? Do your video views get more engagement on Instagram or Twitter? Are they steadily increasing over time?
#2: Analyze Audience Demographics and Interests
Your social media followings might be different for each platform. If you market your business on Pinterest or Snapchat, you know how true this can be.
You also may be missing one demographic of your target audience on one platform. You probably don’t have as many male followers on Pinterest or lack older followers on Snapchat, for example; however, that wouldn’t make sense on Facebook.
#3: Check for Consistency and Quality Across All of Your Channels
Now that you know who your target audience is and how people are interacting with you on social media, it’s time to take a closer look at how you’re using your social media platforms. Ultimately, you want to monitor your presence for consistency and quality.
In many cases, there are discrepancies between platforms, but they may be difficult to notice. For example, do you respond rapidly to Facebook messages and emails, but not Twitter direct messages? Is your branding consistent across all platforms (including your bios, logo, and About Me sections)? Is your voice the same on each platform? If not, is that deliberate?
Also look at the types of content you share across your social platforms and over time. Have you shifted from sharing predominantly blog posts to publishing more user-generated content (UGC) updates?
#4: Review Your Budget and Calculate ROI
Reviewing your budget and calculating your ROI are important aspects of a social media audit but are often overlooked. While many businesses and marketers have a firm grasp of money, calculating total ROI from social media is more difficult, especially when you’re looking at purely social ROI instead of financial ROI.
To tackle this part of your audit, pull up all of your records and look at how much you’re spending on social media.