Five tips on conducting a social media audit

Written by ls2group

At first, social media may seem like a simple way to incorporate digital marketing into your business. Take a deeper dive and you will find that there is much strategy and research to consider in order to have a successful social media presence. Too often businesses simply post to social media without goals in mind and research behind their posts, which makes it nearly impossible to measure success. That’s why it is important to define success and understand what exactly your business’ goals are for your social media accounts prior to posting. This is where a social media audit comes in.

Social media audits allow you to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t working, and what can be improved. If you’re thinking about performing a social media audit, below are five important items to consider.

• Define success. A social media audit provides the opportunity to evaluate your social media goals and helps you understand how to reach them. You can evaluate your current digital presence and learn what changes need to be made, if any, to be more successful. Success to some organizations may mean a higher engagement rate, more impressions, or a higher click-through rate to a website. No matter the goal, a social media audit can ensure you are on the right track to reaching it.
• Know your audience. Once you understand the demographics, interests, and traits of your audience, you can better understand what they would like to see and what content will be impactful to them. An audit also offers the ability to look through what times your audience is online, and, if applicable, you can post around these times. Once you truly understand your audience it will be easier to engage with them moving forward.
• Record analytics to understand performance. Some metrics to analyze include likes/reactions, reach, impressions, and shares/retweets. To better optimize your content, evaluate which days of the week, times, and platforms garner the greatest reach.  Once these trends are identified, you can tailor your upcoming content to increase success. When looking through top performing posts, you can understand what your audience best responds to and center your strategy on something similar.
• Conduct an audit quarterly or annually. Depending on the needs of your organization, a social media audit should be performed quarterly or annually as you can better compare data over a longer period of time. It is difficult to analyze data from month-to-month since there are many different factors, such as holidays or events, that can alter the data significantly. One way to do this is by compiling data into a spreadsheet and designating one column to comparisons to track any changes. 
• Customize your audit to fit your needs. No matter the needs of your social media accounts, it is important to realize that social media audits are completely customizable. You can always analyze and measure different metrics to see how you are, or aren’t, meeting your objectives. As long as your audit is thorough and always keeps your goals in mind, it will provide benefits.

Of course, once you’ve completed your audit, the next step is to ensure you are developing content and a strategy that reflects the key lessons from the audit. Your audit is only as successful as the tools you implement.

Social media can be a great digital marketing tool as long as it’s used with a specific strategy in mind. Using these five tips, a social media audit can ensure you are on a path to meeting your goals and greatly assist your efforts in creating a successful social media strategy that can be properly measured.

Let us know if LS2group can help you reach your social media marketing goals! Learn more at https://69u.24e.myftpupload.com/what-we-do/marketing/.