Audit social media performance
Audit social media performance
1. Identify all social media channels associated with your company, including smaller or seldom-used accounts.
Include accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. If you’re unsure of what accounts exist, perform Google searches to locate accounts that may belong to the company, and to identify potential imposter accounts. Record and dispute imposter accounts with the platform to stop false information being spread about your company, or your protected rights being infringed upon. If you don’t own accounts on a major social media site, note this in your audit; this is good information to have on hand should you decide you want to have a presence on a particular platform in the future.
2. Dedicate a separate space for each platform and record basic account information.
For each profile, record the following information: Bio and About sections. Handle. Profile photo or cover photos. Contact information. Links. Hashtags. Verification. Consider the following questions: Does this information align with the company brand guidelines? Is it relevant and updated? Are there important sections that are missing information? Are the images, Bio, and About sections engaging? Do the links drive to appropriate and informative landing pages? If you answer no to any of these questions, plan to change or update those sections.
3. Take a look at each account from a high level and notice the number of followers you have, the number of posts you have, and the engagement you receive on posts.
Ask yourself if the account, as it stands, is meeting your goals. Do you have an active following? Are you posting regularly? Are your followers engaging with your posts? These questions will help you think about what you can do to improve upon these different areas throughout the audit.
4. Capture best-performing posts and provide screenshots and links to the posts.
If you have access to the analytics function of the social account, navigate to the Business Manager and use data provided in the platform. Typically, the best social media performance metric is engagement, but this depends on your goals. View the top 3 posts according to your success metric. Analyze the posts and look for any trends to help identify what made these perform well. Trends could include: Post copy or tone. Image asset type, like photo, video, infographic, and GIF. Length of post. Post type category. Time of day post was published. Links included.
5. Assess your audience to see if you're reaching the right people and if your content resonates with that audience.
Look at your followers and what characteristics they have. Consider what your business offers to your customers or clients, and what their persona is. For example, if you sell medical equipment, your followers should contain health care professionals or medical institutions. Consider whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, the industry you sell to, the age of your typical clients, the locations you sell to, and any other demographic data that could help determine if your following is composed of the right people. Finally, consider the content you post. Does it resonate with the audience you want to be selling to? For example, if you sell medical equipment, your content should likely have a professional tone, whereas a toy store would be more whimsical.
6. If you use social media to drive traffic to your website, check that all links are working and associated landing pages are up to date.
If links are broken, you will lose a lot of traffic to your website and potential sales. Tracking links also help determine how effective your social media accounts are and if they are contributing to your overall marketing goals. Record where links drive, if they need to be updated or fixed, and whether you use tracking URLs to monitor the activity of those who click your links.
7. From the information collected through the audit, identify the strongest and weakest aspects of your social media account.
For your strength areas, you can use this information to pull through aspects that perform well into other parts of your account. If video content performs well, you can begin to incorporate more videos into your posting. Or, if posts that are published in the morning receive higher engagement, adjust to that schedule. For areas of improvement, take note of what can be improved upon to drive more conversions from your social channels. Take a few of these ideas at a time to implement in areas you think you could use improvement based on the audit.