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How to Perform an Audit on Your Social Media

Dijitally

Social Media

August 29, 2022

10 min read

Regularly conducting a social media audit focusing on your social media ads and content will ensure your social media marketing strategy is always effective.

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How to Perform an Audit on Your Social Media

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Auditing your social media ads & content might not be the most appealing part of any social media marketing strategy.

In fact, we know it’s most likely sitting at the bottom of your list of things to do for your business.

However, in saying that, regularly conducting a social media audit is one of the most important aspects of any effective social media marketing strategy.

An indepth audit of your social media ads, content and accounts in general will help you understand how they are all performing.

Typically this will include auditing the following:

What profiles need to be re-optimised or removed completely
What’s working and what isn’t
Are there fake accounts out there posing as yours?
What new opportunities are available to grow your business

Now, as mentioned, we know that an audit of your social media marketing might seem daunting, but it’s not nearly as difficult & overwhelming as it might seem.

Our latest blog will discuss everything you need to know and do to run an effective social media marketing audit.

To begin with, let's chat about what a social media audit actually is.

What is a Social Media Audit?

Essentially, this is the process of evaluating your business’ key social media metrics in an effort to measure the health of your accounts and find ways to optimise & improve.

During this audit, you will need to store this important information about your ads and content somewhere where it is easily accessible.

Creating a social media audit document on a platform such as Google Drive is a great start.

This information will help you see a more holistic overview of what is happening with your ads and content, as well as show you where to change or tweak things for better results.

How to Perform a Social Media Audit

List Your Accounts

We’d recommend listing all of your social media accounts, inclusive of Facebook Business Manager, as the first task of your audit.

Now, there’s every chance you might not know all of your social media profiles. We’ve all got a Twitter business account that has been lying dormant for some time and forgotten about.

Once you’ve found all your accounts, begin your audit by documenting which ones you do and don’t use on a regular basis.

However, you shouldn’t necessarily dismiss and disconnect them as they might present an opportunity that you otherwise didn’t think of.

In the audit of your existing channels, be sure to document all unowned accounts and what needs to be done to shut them down in the event that you’re not going to use them moving forward.

Is Everything Compliant and On Brand?

Once you’ve completed the first task above, review your brand style guide to ensure that each social network is up to date with logos, colours, keywords, brand voice, hashtags, and more.

Make sure everything is compliant with your brand style guide and that all social accounts are cohesive from that perspective.

This will ensure familiarity should one of your community members be following all of your accounts.

Other things to consider for this part of the audit are:

Profile & cover images
Naming conventions & handles
Bio text
Links
Pinned posts

What Are Your Top Performing Social Media Posts?

The third task in your audit is to assess your existing social media posts and document the types of content that have performed the best in terms of reach, impressions, and engagement.

There are a variety of social media content scheduling platforms that have in-depth analytic tools built in to ensure you can measure your content accordingly but in a matter of seconds.

To begin populating this data ensuring you can measure your top-performing social media content moving forward, we’d strongly recommend onboarding your accounts into these scheduling platforms immediately.

In terms of your best-performing posts, we’d recommend looking for patterns. Do you get significant reach when you post videos versus when you post links that drive traffic? Do users prefer blogs in comparison to links selling your products or services?

Data such as the above will inform your current content as well as your holistic social media strategy moving forward.

Channel Performance

In addition to determining which of your existing social media posts are performing the best, you also need to measure which of your social media channels are performing the best too.

But you can only do this if you have some key goals in place that clearly define what success looks like for your social channels.

Success might be account specific and each one has its own definition of success, or it can be overall channel specific which means your success on social media is defined by certain metrics regardless of the channel.

Either way, you need to identify what success on social media looks like for you whether it be organic or paid.

For example, and depending on what sort of business and campaigns you are running, will depend on what metrics you are measuring on your social media ads.

It might be reach & impressions, leads, product sales, newsletter sign-ups, bookings, etc. It will always come down to what matters most to your business.

Track Results Over a Period of Time

The best way to initially and regularly improve your social media strategy, and achieve all of your goals, is to track your results over a period of time.

Start off by comparing the results you achieved in this quarter or year with the results you achieved last quarter or last year.

This will assist you in analysing seasonal changes and making changes accordingly to ensure you achieve your social media goals & business goals.

This can also be achieved using the social media content scheduling platforms that we mentioned before.

As part of these regular audits, you should also consider how each platform impacts your website and measure those results over time using platforms such as Google Analytics to do so.

Either way, you need to identify what success on social media looks like for you whether it be organic or paid.

Know Your Audience on Each Platform

You need to be aware of the segment of your target audience that typically uses social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, and creates content and ads accordingly.

While this would focus on social media content, it also lends itself to an overall content marketing strategy that this audit would influence.

You can also take this a step further and delve into the native analytics of each of your existing platforms to determine the typical age, gender, location, etc of your followers.

Which Platforms are Right For Your Business?

Whether it be paid or organic, you need to determine which social media platforms are most suitable for your business.

If you run an aged care facility, you’re probably not going to market your business on TikTok largely due to the content that is being produced there and the typical audience that is on the platform.

The thing to remember is that you don’t need to be on every social media platform as there might be some, as outlined above, that just aren’t applicable.

Additionally, you might be an eCommerce brand that only wants to start off on a particular platform, to begin with, nail it, and then add in another channel in the future.

You might then perform another social media audit in 12 months' time and recognise that you need to add another platform that you’ve identified as an opportunity.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

There are many things in business that you can do once and never have to do them ever again. Unfortunately, auditing your social media content and ads on a semi-regular basis isn’t one of those.

Audits should be conducted at least every 6 months to ensure you constantly trying to improve your presence in the paid and organic environment.

This will allow you to compare previous results, optimise where necessary, and continue ensuring you are getting the best results possible.

Summing up...

List Your Accounts

Which social media platforms are you currently using

Review Your Existing Content

What is performing best?

Measure Results

Continually analyse performance and optimise for efficiencies