How to Run an Effective Social Media Audit
Never done a social media audit before? It’s not as daunting as it sounds. Here are our tips on getting started and how to effectively run an audit on your social media.
Posted last year
Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted last year
When you hear the word audit, do you also run and cry and scream? Same. But, not all audits are made equal—especially a social media audit. You can learn a lot about how your accounts are doing, where you’re going wrong (and right!), and how to best approach your social media strategy moving forward.
In today’s blog, we’re teaching you everything you need to know about doing a social media audit—from what one is to why it’s important to our top tips on things to focus on while running your own audit.
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Why is running a social media audit important?
Before we give you the step-by-step on how to run a social media audit, let’s first get into why it’s important. I mean, why are you going to do all of this work with no payoff? Answer: You wouldn’t! This is the exact reason why running a social media audit on your account is important:
Identify areas for improvement
One of the biggest reasons people run a social media audit is because it can help you identify areas of your social media strategy that need improvement AKA your content strategy, engagement, or audience targeting. Identifying these areas will help you refine your strategy and improve your social media performance.
Optimize your content
By reviewing your content strategy and analyzing your audience demographics, you can optimize your content to better resonate with your target audience. For example, if you know that your audience is liking more videos over posts, start adding more videos to your content plan. Or, perhaps your audience likes carousel posts with top tips about how they can improve their mental health, start making more! When you figure out what your audience actually wants from you, you can make sure the content you create reflects that.
Stay competitive
Stay ahead of your competition! A social media audit can help you stay competitive by analyzing your competitors’ social media accounts and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Once you identify those, you can start working out which parts of their social strategy has holes in them that you can come and fill. This can help you refine your social media strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
💡 Flick’s tip: Learn how to do a competitive analysis on your competition through our blog here.
Monitor your progress
This is one of the most important steps—track your progress! By tracking your social media metrics and setting goals and objectives, you can monitor your progress over time and make adjustments as needed. Not seeing something working for you like you hoped? Pivot and adjust your strategy. But you won’t know this if you’re not monitoring your progress, so look at your social media accounts’ analytics and keep on top of them to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Ensure consistency
A social media audit can help you ensure that your brand or business is presenting a consistent message across all social media platforms. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times: consistency is key when it comes to growing your social media presence. This will help make your brand and brand image stronger and make it easier for your audience to recognize and engage with your content.
Overall, a social media audit is an essential step in developing a successful social media strategy and improving your social media performance. By analyzing your accounts and making adjustments as needed, you can optimize your content, stay competitive, and achieve your social media goals. Now it’s time to learn how exactly to run a social media audit.
How to run a social media audit
Yay! You’ve made it. Finally, how in the world do you run a social media audit on your accounts? Here is your detailed list and guide on how to run one for yourself.
Identify Your Social Media Accounts
You might think you know all of your social media accounts, but do you really? Chances are, you might have forgotten some old test accounts you made that have since gone inactive … or just ones you made that you swore you’d keep updated and never have.
Go through all of the major social networks and search for your brand, product, services you provide, or old names you might have used previously. Trust us: You might uncover some accounts you didn’t realize were there.
Once you identify all of your accounts, get rid of and transfer the data of the old accounts you might have discovered. If you’ve found any accounts that are imposters or using your own materials, report them so they can get taken down.
You can now start tracking all of your accounts in one central place (hey, Flick can help you there!), so you can see all of your social in one spot to see if there is anything missing in your social strategy. For example: Are you on every single social platform? Are you on too many? You don’t have to be on every single platform out there—it might not be where your audience is at. So running an audit of all social platforms you have and how well they are performing is essential.
Put all of this information in a spreadsheet and separate out your spreadsheet with:
- The social network
- The URL
- Your profile name
- Number of followers
- Amount of content
Review Your Profile Information
If you posted all of your social media branding a long time ago and haven’t gone back to it, you definitely want to do that—especially if your branding looks different on each platform.
Like we said above, consistency is key so making sure that all of your social media channels are streamlined and on a consistent brand is important to your overall strategy.
When working on your audit, go through and make sure all of your profiles match, like:
- Bio and “About” language
- URLs and landing pages
- Hashtags
- Profile image
- Banner image
This will help set your brand apart and make people recognize your brand more easily.
Understand your audience on each platform
If you don’t know who your audience is, you’re doing it wrong. Dig through your demographics (if you need help doing that, click here!) to discover who you’re talking to when it comes to your social media accounts.
And don’t think one of your account’s demographics is how your demographics will look across the board because social media isn’t one-size-fits-all. Each account will require something a bit different from yours based on the demographics of that platform.
For example: You wouldn’t approach TikTok the same way you would approach Facebook because the demographics on both are vastly different.
In the spreadsheet you’ve created, write down the details of each of your audiences. Gender, age, location, and more. This will help you come up with a plan for how you approach each platform.
Define your specific goals for each social network
It’s all well and good that you have social media accounts and are active … but what exactly do you want your social media accounts to help you with? This is something that is crucial when it comes to doing your social media audit.
What exactly are your goals? They could be anywhere from:
- Growing your followers
- Increasing your engagement
- Increasing your link clicks
- Increasing reach
You can’t do any of those things if you don’t know your exact goals when it comes to your social media strategy. Set specific, measurable, and achievable goals and objectives for your social media accounts. Use these goals to guide your social media strategy and track your progress.
Evaluate Your Brand Voice
This is one of our favorite ones around here! Figuring out your brand voice and perfecting it is one of the most important things you need to hone in on when you start auditing your social media accounts. Say it with me again: consistency is so important. Evaluate your brand voice across all the channels, including the tone and language you use in your posts.
If you need help with fine-tuning your brand voice, click here to read about how to find yours.
Check Your Social Media Metrics
We know, we know. This one is a major “duh” moment but it’s important to check your social media metrics, including engagement rate, reach, and impressions. How else are you going to know if your content has done well or is doing well if you’re not looking at the data?
Go to your social media pages and look up the insights on each. Figure out what your average engagement rate is, the average amount of likes you get, how many clicks you get through the link in your bio, etc. Keep track of that information to help you identify what types of posts do well for you so you can craft an incredible social media strategy in the future.
💡 Flick’s tip: Try Flick free for 7 days to get all the insights into your account! We’ll help you identify which post did the best, which ones could use some work, how you stack up against your competition, and more.
Monitor Your Competitors
Want to know how well your social media actually is doing? You need to take a good hard look at your competition. Monitor your competitors’ social media accounts and compare their performance to yours. Identify their strengths and weaknesses and use this information to refine your social media strategy. Here are some things to think about when it comes to looking at your competitor’s social:
- What posts are doing really well for them?
- How are they using CTAs in their content?
- What types of content work for them—videos, images, polls, etc?
- What are some areas that you can see improvement in? How can you fill that space with your own content?
Update your marketing strategy
Now that you have an idea of how to get started with your social media audit, it’s time to update your marketing strategy! Go through all the information you’ve gathered and evaluate which parts you need to focus more of your time and energy on and other parts that are doing well that you can expand upon.
Get all the information you need to build an incredible marketing strategy here.
Want to get a breakdown on how to do an intensive Instagram audit? Click here for your guide and click the banner below to download your free Instagram audit checklist!
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