How to Conduct a Social Media Audit

You have an idea who your buyer is, you've figured out what channels to use, and you've started posting on your social media channels. But how do you know if what you're doing is working? Are you posting the right content? Is your audience responding? Is there a return on investment or ROI in your social campaigns? Or are you even investing in the right things? That's where social metrics come in. Let's start by learning how to look at all of your data as a whole and to set up benchmarks for future reporting. You'll want to conduct a social media audit a hard look at the data from all your social accounts and the social conversations about your brand and your competitors. Conducting a social media audit will help develop or adjust a social media strategy that aligns to specific, actionable business objectives and goals to discover trends you can use to create or modify social media campaigns. Receive valuable insight into customer sentiment and perception of your brand. Provide executives and your team a look into what is or is not working so you can manage and justify social media spend. An audit gives you the opportunity to see the ebb and flow of your audience, engagement, content, performance, and what's working and what's not. It's a way for you to put your thumb on the pulse of everything you're doing in social as part of your audit, you're going to be looking at a whole bunch of data. There are a variety of ways to record all this information, but many social media managers find that developing a tabbed spreadsheet is the way to go. It will be helpful if you have a social analytics tool such as Netbase, Sysmos, Crimson, Hexagon, or another type of metrics tool that you can aggregate your data, but if not, you can manually pull the data and compile it from each channel's social media metrics. Some of these metrics are easy to acquire by going to the social networks themselves. Facebook has business Insights and Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube all have analytics you can explore. If you use the HubSpot social tools, you can use reports to analyze some of what is needed, namely your social website traffic and your content. Post data if you are just starting out with social media, you might not need to conduct an audit yet. But understanding what goes into an audit will help you set up a framework that can help you capture much of this data on a weekly or monthly basis, which will save you time in the long run. Let's dig in. The metrics you need can be found in a variety of places, whether it's in Google Analytics, on the social network's main pages, or within the account in the analytics sections for each channel. A spreadsheet can help you keep track of all this information. Note that the metrics for each social media channel will be slightly different based on the available numbers you can measure, but there are a few commonalities you should look at. You'll want to start by listing your owned channels, those social handles that your company owns. The bigger your business, the more likely you are to have many channels. Then list who the internal owners of the channels are and who has the passwords or who has been granted access. This will help you know if you need additional governance for your channels. For example, are there people who have access to Facebook who no longer should also record how many followers you have on your official social channels? You'll want to keep track of this metric moving forward. Next, you might want to explore your non owned channels and followers. Are there channels that are illegally using your assets and logos and potentially taking a share of your followers? Are there fan channels that are co opting your branding? Should you consider filing takedown notices for some of these channels or find better ways to interact with those accounts? If there are channels that are co opting your logo, name or other brand visuals, you can report them to the individual network for removal. Then consider the profiles for each channel. Do all your social channels have a similar look and feel? Does your profile imagery such as your covers, icons and avatars adhere to your company brand guidelines? Is your tone and voice consistent across the channels? Let's move on to content performance. This is a big one and you'll want to analyze each channel individually afterward. You can also use this data to determine if some of that content might resonate differently or better in other channels. Some of the metrics you should track Best and worst performing posts Posts with the most engagement things like comments and likes Post Frequency what types of content have the best and worst performance? The published time of posts that have the best engagement Video views Click through to Content post Reach and impressions Number of Twitter mentions Effective Keywords Response rate Are you responding in a timely manner? Sentiment Note that some tools enable you to measure positive and negative sentiment. Don't forget about advertising if you're doing a lot of social media advertising, you might want to conduct a separate in depth audit using the analytics and the ad tools found within the networks where you're advertising. You'll want to track similar metrics to the above for content performance, but also look at budgets, roi, A B, test results and areas for opportunity you'll also want to analyze your competition. Go to each of your competitors social media channels and take a look at how they use their networks. How are your competitors using social media? How many followers do they have compared to you? How is their content performing? What types of content perform the best? How do they engage with their followers? By examining the competition you can get a sense of how you stack up, but also where you might have gaps that you need to close. Seeing all of this information in one place is a powerful way to analyze the effectiveness of your content and your tactics. You can identify weaknesses in your approach, determine what is working well so you can do more of the same. Stop in effective programs or understand if you need more resources to do a better job. Even better. Now you have the metrics you need to argue for those additional resources. Conducting an audit might take some time, but the value it will provide can help you do a few different Develop new benchmarks and KPIs determine the best mix of content on the right channel at the right times. Identify opportunities to better engage with customers. Adjust budgets and calculate roi. Identify how you need to make resource changes to boost social media efforts. Be prepared to conduct an audit of this depth every 12 to 18 months at minimum. More often if you don't have strong metrics you regularly track. With the rapidly changing social media landscape, you'll want to always have an eye on how your efforts are making an impact. Now step back and take a look at this overall audit. Consider your buyer Persona and your business goals. What are the metrics your executives will care about most? Pull those details out and prepare a shorter, more condensed version that you can deliver on a weekly or monthly basis. There you have it all the basics of measuring your social media A step that can be a game changer for your business. 14.