If you’re using social media to market your business, you definitely need to understand how it fits into your overall marketing plan. Defining how social media fits into your strategy is crucial to build and grow a business. Social media plays a unique role that brings together the building of a brand internally and externally.
Using social media in your overall marketing plan can help by:
- Establishing Your Brand Voice
- Plan and Create Content Consistency
- Provide Customer Service
So, where do you start?
The first step is to perform a social media audit. Let us walk you through the steps to conduct an effective audit of your social media platforms to ultimately helps you understand and track what’s working and what’s not on each network.
What Is a Social Media Audit?
The word “audit” tends to bring about thoughts of tax advisors and accountants. Thankfully, a social media audit is not that complicated. A social media audit is simply the exercise of reviewing your current social efforts while highlighting the best way to improve results.
Below we’ve mapped out each step to complete your first social media audit. Keep in mind, you can repeat these steps anytime you need to analyze your presence.
1. Identify all social media profiles
The first thing you will need to do is to find and document all of your social media profiles. Did you start a Pinterest account that you never ended up using? Begin a video strategy on YouTube but end up scrapping it due to production costs? No problem – just find it and document it.
Once you’ve documented your profiles, then you can decide if you want to keep or ditch them. Keep in mind, if you’d like to ditch a profile, but not necessarily delete it, a simple call to action like “Visit us on Facebook” or “Visit our website” in the About section will suffice. Otherwise, you can delete your profile and move on.
2. Define goals for each network
Chances are during your inventory you may have uncovered networks that you didn’t have a clue where out there. Definitely verify the big four: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and then do a general search to make sure there are not any random accounts out there under your company name. Again, the point of this exercise is to make sure you have these profiles claimed and under your control. Are there any opportunities or social media trends unique to the networks you should consider using?
Once you have your list of social media profiles, it’s time to focus on your goals for each network.
Goals can include:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Increased community engagement
- Audience Growth
- Increased website traffic
Not only will setting goals help define your content, but it will also help you set appropriate metrics to track.
3. Make sure each account is complete and brand consistent
As you work through your audit, make sure to compare the branding on all of your channels. Do you have the most current logo uploaded to each? Also, did you make sure your Bio and About sections match? Obviously, you will want to make sure all of your website URLs are current and go to the appropriate pages you wish to promote. In addition, be sure your contact details such as hours, phone number(s), and email address are up to date.
It is important to keep your profiles current across the board. Having your social channels well documented will help you make updates when launching new campaigns. Additionally, noting your changes will help you, in the long run, to make sure your brand is consistent. This will be an even bigger help for businesses that heavily rely on seasonal changes, and therefore they change their profile and banner images often.
In our GreenCup Digital Social Media Audit, we go through platform-specific checklists to make sure any and all fields are filled in and optimized. We also make sure branding and language are consistent across all platforms.
4. Identify your best posts
During your audit, a helpful thing to do is to drill down to your existing posts and see what is already working. This highlights what kind of content you should continue to create. The native platform analytics in each platform is enough to get you started – i.e., Facebook impressions, Instagram reach, etc.
Most scheduling platforms will offer reporting that can show you your high-ranking posts in a matter of seconds. From there, you can insert that type of content, such as photos, videos, lives, or website links, into your future social media calendars.
5. Evaluate Competitors
Especially if you are a new company or just getting started on social media, evaluating competitors is a great way to figure out what type of content you should get started with. For example, does your competitor do well with funny memes? If so, add a little humor to your content plan. While they might not be product or service-specific, they inspire the virality you need to get all of your content seen eventually.
In addition, reviewing the competing profiles helps you to understand what content is NOT working!
6. Establish goals, new objectives, and action items
Once you have run through your first audit, you will have a lot of data to see how everything is performing and where the gaps are. So now what? Now it’s time to make a plan of action. Here are a few goals you can begin tracking:
Follower/Fan Growth – You can track this simply by tracking how many followers you have today and how many you have at the end of the period. (week/month/year)
Engagement – Depending on the network, this could look slightly different. For example, you would track likes, comments, and shares on Facebook. On Twitter, you will likely track likes and retweets.
Content – What types of content are performing the best? Photos, links, live video? Depending on the channel, your audit will tell you what’s doing the best, and therefore what you should post more. Be sure to note the platform as often certain types of content perform differently for each network.
Referral Traffic – Clicks to your website are so important. Not only can this trip the algorithm to move your posts up the feed, but it also can improve your SEO score!
Establish your baseline numbers in each of these metrics and set goals. Once you’ve done this, tracking will be so much easier!
Ready to Conduct Your Social Media Audit?
Too often we meet companies who don’t have a plan on social media. Maybe you’ve been “winging it,” or you just don’t see the value in what social media can mean to your company. Either way, a quick audit can help you see if your social media strategy aligns with your goals and supports your business.
To improve your performance on social media, you need to know where you’re starting. Doing a social media audit helps you do just that.
Social media is the number one, most cost-effective tool a small business can use today to connect with and grow its customer base. GreenCup Digital can help you create a strong social presence that can build community, engage your customers, and impact your SEO. Talk to us today!
