5 Steps to a Successful Social Media Audit

If you’re trying to lose weight, a daily drop in pounds and inches will motivate you to continue working out and eating well. When you step on the scale Monday morning to see your weight increase after a weekend of binge eating, you know you’ve failed. And when you stay on track for a whole week, you’re rewarded with the numbers you were looking for.

Social media is no different. Goal setting and regular audits keep your performance on track and your daily task list meaningful. A social media audit allows you to review your past outcomes and make educated decisions moving forward. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. In turn, you’ll get a higher return on your investment when it comes to both time and money. Not to mention the fact that analytics are the easiest way to back up your recommendations—it’s hard to argue with data.

1. Create a Social Media Audit Spreadsheet

Start by analyzing the big picture. Look at all of the social media presences that you’ve established. Record the handles, URLs and owners. The goal here is to find those profiles you may have created eons ago but forgotten about. Above, you can see that no one owns Foodseum’s Google+ Page and it has been neglected for months.

This can also be a great opportunity to document your passwords in one location. Create a separate column for this information.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Are we spread too thin across too many social networks?
• Does each network have an owner who can dedicate time to growing that profile?

2. Look for Inconsistencies

Go through each account and look for consistency in bio descriptions, profile photos and handles. You may even want to add some sort of consistency to your passwords.

In the Foodseum audit example above, you can see a naming inconsistency under Facebook. While the URL is http://ift.tt/1gR9Q3O, the Page is named “Chicago Foodseum.” Perhaps it’s time for a name change so all tagging opportunities across the social networks are consistent.

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

When it comes to bio and profile pics, Foodseum is mostly consistent except for Pinterest and Google+. It seems that the bio on these networks is out of date. While each network may serve a different purpose, the messaging surrounding your company should have the same look and feel.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is it easy for someone to find my social presences and tag them?
• Are my profile photos and bios consistent across all networks?

3. Record Your Strategy for Each Network

Audits are also a great way to find the real truth behind your work. Your engagement might be high, but is the engagement happening with the correct demographic? Are you getting distracted by highly engaged followers who don’t fit your target demographic and will never become loyal customers? Is one network giving you a poor return on investment while another one is soaring?

Before you begin assessing the details of follower growth and engagement, a strategy must be clearly defined for each network. Boil it down to a brief statement and document this in a separate tab or column on your spreadsheet. If you’ve not already established this for each network, ask yourself these three basic questions:

• What are you trying to achieve with each network: Awareness? Traffic? Sales? Customer service?
• What kind of content are you sharing on each network? Why? When?
• Who is your target audience on each network? Why?

This post can help with defining your social media strategy. Don’t forget that part of your strategy might be shutting down social presences that you’ve abandoned. In Foodseum’s case, Google+ clearly doesn’t have a defined strategy. A decision will have to be made to make an effort to grow the presence or to abandon it.

4. Track Your Growth

This can be done in a separate tab on the spreadsheet document you’ve created above. Your social media analytics, both in the platforms and via third parties like Sprout Social, can seem overwhelming at first. But they are absolutely necessary in understanding whether or not your actions are making progress. Gather as much data as you can for the past year. The goal here is to compare month over month and year over year.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Which networks are growing the fastest and why?
• Which networks are suffering and why?
• What growth goals do we want to reach by next month? Next year?

5. Track Your Engagement

On your growth chart, add in a column for engagement for each social network. While Twitter and Facebook’s in-site analytics can offer some great information, Sprout Social’s Engagement Report is a quick and easy way to see your ranking across both Facebook and Twitter when it comes to engagement during a certain time period. Sprout Social can also help you make more sense of your individual Facebook analyticsand Twitter analytics as well.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Which network has our highest engagement rate and why?
• Which month had our highest engagement level and why?
• What benchmarks can we set for each post? Or each week?

Put the Social Media Audit Into Action

An audit is a great step toward a successful social media presence, but the audit itself is only half the battle. Now you must translate your findings into actionable and educated steps that will help you reach your goals.

Here are a few ways you can take action after your audit:

• Take notice of the posts that perform well. Try to figure out why it was popular (text? images? timing?) and then brainstorm a way to increase the frequency of those kinds of posts.
• Translate a popular past post into a new one. Compose similar content but with a twist—and a conversion goal like a newsletter sign-up. Then pay to boost the post.
• Let data drive your content. Consider all of the data points you’ve gathered and draft up editorial direction for each network that focuses on engagement or growth.
• Record your successes. Take screenshots of your best posts and include them in a Power Point presentation that can be consulted for inspiration on a daily basis.
• Track your engagement. Create a spreadsheet filled with the shares, likes, and comments of your most popular posts that can act as benchmarks to break next month.

Regardless of how you choose to put your audit into action, your time and money will be better spent. With a more strategic approach, your social reach should steadily increase and outperform the previous audit. A social media audit isn’t meant to be done once a year, but it’s also not meant to be conducted daily, like the dreaded morning step onto the scale. Find a timeline that makes sense for your business goals and one that will propel your social media strategy to new heights.

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