In this article, I want to take you
What is a social media audit?
Like any audit, a social media audit means taking stock of your current social media setup. Essentially, you want to try and get a complete picture of your social media, as well as your competitors presence too. This will allow you to identify which areas are performing well, and where could do with attention. It will also help you spot any gaps, or areas that you could expand into.
Ultimately, it allows you to take control of your social media, so you can come up with a cohesive strategy to improve conversions and turn fans into customers.
Now that I have covered what a social media audit is, we can take a look at how exactly you carry an audit out.
Break it down
To begin, you are going to need to break down your social media into its constituent parts. Focus on each platform separately, otherwise, you will get overwhelmed very quickly. Each social media platform has its own set of metrics, and you are going to want to take your time on each to build up a complete picture.
Within each platform, it is probably worth trying to pull apart paid placements and campaigns and organic growth. Having each of these separate is going to help you understand how your social media spend is performing and will highlight areas where you could save.
Also, try to keep track of the different types of content you make and how they perform. For example, if you are using video on social media as well as pictures, keep track of how these different types of post perform.
If you have a social media managing platform, this part will be made easier as they should already have everything nicely arranged for you.
Deep dive into the data
The heart of your audit is going to be each social platform’s analytics. You are going to need to get your hands dirty and do some number crunching.
What you want to do here is to pull together all the metrics that you care about. If you have access to historical data here, this will be even better, because you can see the way these metrics are changing and evolving. Already, by pulling together all these numbers you will start to see areas you could improve, and areas where you are knocking it out of the park.
While you might feel like you’ve finished once the numbers are all in one place, this data will only be valuable if you can use it. So, you need to present these numbers in an easy to understand way. Consider using infographics, graphs and any other visualisation tools to help make sense of the data. This is critical to help you get a bigger picture of what is going on, as it is very easy to get lost in all the numbers otherwise!
Take a peek at the competition
Finally, once you have got all your own data together, it is time to go out and have a look at how your competitors are doing. Clearly, you cannot get the same level of detail on your competitors, but you can see basic, public information that will give you some idea of how you stack up.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this article has helped lay the groundwork for you to audit the social media audit of your startup. It is so easy to overlook this kind of thing, it can get lost in the day to day running of a business. But taking the time to step back and survey your social media presence as a whole can be invaluable. It lets you see what is working, and what isn’t, which is always the first step to improving.
