Searching for hassle-free ways to know whether your social media strategy is working correctly in providing you desired results? Well! To grab the opportunity existing right in front of you must fix the mushrooming issues lying beneath. Auditing, therefore, comes as a rescuer for identifying and dealing with these issues.
The best part is, that it is not at all a tear-your-hair sort of work. It simply examines all your social media channels to make you aware of:
- What is working best?
- What is useless?
and thus, provides you with the scope for improvement across all your social media channels which makes sense to your brand.
Here in this article, we have sequenced some easy steps along with our customized recommendations especially for you to perform a Social Media Audit effectively for your continuous growth.
Step 1: Identifying Social Media Channels Where Your Brand is Present
Start by listing all the social media profiles that your company runs. Google your brand name and the utmost popular channels showing your presence will pop up. Channels with high authority appear on the first page but don’t limit your search to the first page you must scroll down to the second and third page as well, as they will help determine if there is any fake or hoax account running under your brand name.
Side by side, form a spreadsheet citing basic details under columns like Links to the profile, and owner details of all the accounts where you are active. It will act as a home for your social media audit making the process easier for you.
Our Recommendation: We would recommend you create a specific column with Shutdown(Yes/No) as it will help you in tracking the hoax account holder and will inform you whether there is a need to ask the hoax account holder to shut down these channels or not.
Step 2: Performing Adequacy Analysis for Each Social Media Account
Start by Jotting down specific reasons for your presence across all these social media channels and then analyze the reasons like: Are they working as per your strategy? Or are just a mere means of securing your brand name etc. Secondly, you can also perform adequacy analysis by identifying whether your target audience uses it or not.
By reviewing these two pointers you will get a fair idea if these channels are working as per your strategy and if they are worth investing your time in or not.
Our Recommendation: While performing adequacy analysis prepare a one-liner mission statement for each of your profiles and side by side keep cross-checking if they are perfectly aligning with your mission statement or goals and if you should consider improving/ discontinuing usage of such Social Media accounts.
Step 3: Quality and Consistency check for your Social Media Account
Consistency is the key to quality. To portray your Brand as per your Strategy the basic key that you should follow is maintaining consistency across all your social media accounts. For this, you must ensure:
- The company Logo you are using on different channels must be the same as you are using on your website.
- An appealing and updated crisp description about your company that highlights the keywords describing the nature of work that your company does. This should be specified on each channel.
- A correct URL to your website must be specified along with all the necessary basic details like Contact Details, Email IDs, and any other links with relevant landing pages.
You must also keep a check on the clarity of your brand voice i.e. consistent way of delivering messages across all the channels. There shouldn’t be any redundancy in terms of the content that you post across all your profiles but the manner of quoting that information must be the same across all these channels if you are using a formal tone on one and casual for another it may not seem appealing and working. You must use a single tone of expression for all your channels.
Our Recommendation: Give your target audience a reason to follow you across all the channels wherever you are present and this could be made possible only if you put across engaging content. Keep track that you are posting content as per the network’s purpose for example: You can share helpful, crisp content on Twitter and address your audience queries over here. For Facebook, you can opt for more engaging and fun sort of content.
Step 4: Auditing your Target Audience
At this stage by performing the steps above you have become aware of the purpose of your presence on all the relevant social media channels and their role in promoting your brand. Now it is time to analyze whether you are approaching the appropriate audience on these channels or not. For this purpose, you can opt for tools offered by Google one such is Google Analytics wherein you can assess your audience report simply by filtering your audiences based on factors such as Their Gender, Location, Age, and other demographic details. The generated result should be with those people who visit your website and seek services from you. For this, you can consider getting help from a Website Development Company.
Our Recommendation: To get a view of which social media network has attracted most of your target audience. You can follow these simple steps:
To open your network reports in analytics click on the “Acquisition” tab. Afterward, you will see an option for “All Traffic” Click on that and then click on “Channels” From there select Social from there and you will get the report showing which social media networks help you bring the traffic generated by your target audience.
Step 5: Finding out if Your Audience is engaged
The audience plays a crucial role in this process of Development of your brand through Social network channels so it becomes a necessity to keep your audience engaged. Therefore, its auditing is also required to check whether your activities on social media are giving desirable results for you or not.
Our Recommendation: You can check your different Social Media Network strategies by simply using these ways which are elaborated on below:
Conversation Rate: For checking your conversion rate, firstly you need to consider whether all things you are publishing on your account are engaging your target audience. The formula for checking it goes like this: Conversation Rate equals several audience replies or comments per post. The maximum the conversation level the higher the engagement level of your audience. Lowering the conversation rate means you are not posting relevant information that your audience is looking for.
Consolidation Rate: It specifies no. of times your content is being liked shared or retweeted by your target audience. The higher the sharing of the post the more your content is being promoted by the audience the more the degree of engagement.
These two ways will give you a deep insight into to which extent your audience is engaged by your posts and you can take specific actions for further improvements.
Step 6: Performing Competitive Analysis
Like you are auditing your audience it is equally necessary to audit your competitors as well this completes the Social Media Auditing Process. To gain a competitive edge over your competitors, you must keep track of what kind of content they are posting, and how many likes and followers they have over different channels. If they are posting something interesting that is engaging the audience you can embrace that kind of content on your channel too. This will also help you in determining new strategies providing scope for further growth.
Our Recommendation: You must focus on these specific points to enhance the effectiveness of the competitor auditing step:
- On which platforms your competitors are present?
- How they are showcasing themselves on these platforms (To be specific go
- through their description, profiles, etc.)
- Who is their Target Audience
- What kind of content do they post on their page?
- How frequently do they post?
- What is the strategy they follow for each of their networks?
- This analysis will help you to expand the outlook of your efforts and will lead to improvements.
To sum it all up
And this is it all you need to follow for conducting a Social Media Audit. By following my recommendations specifically customized for your needs you would be able to have a considerate understanding of how so far, your strategy has helped you in attaining your envisioned goals and objectives and what you might need for improvements to gain an edge in the market through various Social Media platforms.
