While a social media audit can sound a bit intimidating and not at all fun, try to think of it as an opportunity to check in with your accounts before the holiday season (or any other big event such as a new product launch) approaches. Once completed, you’ll have a clear understanding of what’s working and what’s not, so you can take confident steps moving forward with your social strategy.
First things first, you will need to have KPIs or goals already in place for each individual social media account. Yes, that means crunching numbers, but don’t worry – we’ll move on to more fun stuff later!
Diving Into Your Social Analytics
If you ARE using a 3rd party platform like Later or Sprout Social to auto-publish your content, that means you also have access to more insights than the native Instagram app typically gives you. If not, you can still audit your accounts using native app reporting tools. While we’re not going to get into app-specific analytics, we’re going to help you uncover what’s working and what’s not by giving you 5 prompts to ask during your audit.
- First, did you meet or exceed your previously established goals?
- If the answer to that question is YES, how will you continue to capitalize on the content that’s working? If the answer is NO, what does a pivot look like for your brand? Ex: Will you start creating more video content vs static posts?
- If you were to place your following and engagement trends on a graph for the past 6 months, would they steadily be trending up, down, or have they remained stagnant?
- What are your top-performing posts? Find the similarities between them. Is it the format? Do videos always perform better? Do some hooks work better than others? When you share valuable tips do they get saved more than product updates?
- Are you meeting your audience where they are? Ex: Have they migrated to platforms like TikTok and you still haven’t set up a profile there?
Update Your Branding
Whether you’ve recently completed a brand refresh or not, it’s always a good idea to check in with your branding across all the social platforms you’re on, starting with your profile picture. Is it the correct dimensions and resolution for that particular platform? Could your Facebook banner be switched out to better reflect your positioning or maybe an upcoming sale? What about your bio? Is there a better, more straightforward way to say who you are and what you do? Only you know the answer to that question.
Check Your Permissions
Does that Social Media Manager you hired 5 years ago (who no longer works for you) still have access to your Facebook Page? It’s time to clean house and check in with who has access to your social profiles. While we want to assume that everyone has the best intentions, your social profiles are the new “homepage” of your website, and it only takes one post to cause a PR nightmare. It’s always in your best interest to keep close tabs on who has access to your business and online presence.
Check In On Your Competitors
If you’re not regularly checking your competitors’ pages to see what they’re posting online, are you even a real business owner? All jokes aside, you need to know how your competitors are showing up online so you can use your value proposition in order to draw in new customers (and keep the ones you have, happy). You can use social listening tools like Unbox Social, BuzzSumo, Similar Web, and Sprout Social, or you can simply head to their profiles every so often to see what types of content their posting.
Finally, Set The Tone Moving Forward
Once you’ve completed your audit, you’ll have everything you need to make changes or improvements moving forward. If there’s one thing we know to be true, it’s that social media is a constant experiment, and just because one aspect of your social strategy may not “work”, doesn’t mean the entire strategy should be thrown out the window. Keep experimenting with platforms, formats, trends, and the balance between organic and paid advertising.
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