Social media audit - How to use it? | Weboptim
Wondering if your social media marketing efforts are paying off?
Want to better understand what works and what doesn't?
A social media audit can help you analyse the impact of your social media tactics. We've summarised how to conduct an audit of your clients' social media channels.
What is a Social Media Audit?
When we conduct a social media audit, we collect and analyse in detail data from our clients' social media accounts. We look closely at activity, results, audiences and financial investment (including advertising spend).
We want to know if our social media efforts are relevant to the current objectives.
We have an old Facebook group for our subscription-based training camp program that we no longer run? Have we highlighted a post to send users to your latest landing page? Audit can help you analyze these details.
In order to get the full picture, we need to check all aspects of social media marketing. Let's look at traditional metrics such as engagement and clicks, as well as often overlooked factors such as:
- the general mood of user engagement
- average response and response time
- a link to our website from each social platform
- interaction between users
- how users contact us. Do you miss comments, reviews and direct messages?
Breaking the social media audit into four parts makes it easier to organise and evaluate the results. Since we can compare data from different platforms, it is useful to summarise all the results in a single table.
#1: Measurement of general results
The first step of the audit is to collect all the social media indicators that can be used to assess the overall result. These indicators are:
- Number of followers
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Click to visit
- Video views
- Accessing an entry
- Number of comments (Twitter)
While these indicators are available through the platform's own analytics tool (with the exception of Snapchat), third-party social analytics tools allow us to report on this information.
Let's also look at the details when analysing the indicators. Let's take a look at how we compare different types of posts. Do we get more interactions on Facebook when we tag a post than when we share a blog post? Do video views result in more interaction on Instagram or Twitter?
Sometimes our assumptions can be wrong, so it is very important to monitor the data. For example, it's quite annoying if you have relatively low engagement on Pinterest, for example, compared to your other social profiles. However, after monitoring, you may find that Pinterest is actually generating more traffic to your website despite this.
In this part of the audit, we will determine what types of posts work best on each platform, which platforms are most valuable to us, and how audiences behave on each platform.
Third-party tools can provide additional information such as which day or days of the week our posts have achieved the highest engagement numbers. Take this information into account.
# 2: Audience demographic and interest analysis
The number of followers may vary from platform to platform.
Some platforms may lack demographic values of our target audience that are important to us. For example, we probably don't have male followers on Pinterest, or we're missing older followers on Snapchat; however, this wouldn't make sense on Facebook.
Let's compare our social media audiences, look at demographics and interest factors. If we are not reaching key demographics on any of the platforms, find out why not.
# 3: Check consistency and quality across all our channels
Now that we know who our target audience is and how they interact with us, it's time to take a closer look at how we use social media platforms. Let's look at our own presence for consistency and quality.
In many cases, there may be differences between platforms, but it is difficult to spot them. For example, do we respond quickly to Facebook messages and emails, but not so well to Twitter messages? Is our brand consistent across all platforms (including branding, logo, description, etc.)? Do we have the same voice across all platforms? If not, is it intentional?
Let's also look at the types of content that have been shared on social platforms recently. Make sure our profile formatting is in line with current trends and includes any new platform features we've missed. Facebook often changes the layout of pages, for example, it now allows you to save pinned posts to the top of your timeline.
# 4: Overview of the budget and calculation of the ROI (return on investment)
Reviewing the budget and calculating ROI is an important part of a social media audit, yet it is often overlooked. It is more difficult to calculate the full ROI of social media, especially when the financial ROI is not considered, only the community ROI.
To tackle this part of the audit, let's pull up all the records and see how much we spend on social media. Possible costs include:
- Advertisement publishing
- Consultancy or agency fees
- Third party analysis and management tools
- Application software
- Apps and tools for creating images
- Staff who help with social media work
- Tools to manage and display your website
- Professional photographers or tools for photography
Compare the costs and the results. For example, if you spend 40 000 HUF on competition software, generating 304 leads and 102 conversions, with a monthly subscription of 4000 HUF, you can clearly see the return on investment.
By looking at third-party analytics, management and conversational tools, we can see the costs and benefits. Have these tools made us more efficient? In addition, see if they helped us produce better results for our content.
Although the audit takes some time, it is worth doing. You can find out what works for your business on social media, what you can improve and who your audience is. The results will help us create stronger social media plans and campaigns.
Most entrepreneurs do not have time to monitor and manage their social media channels. Our agency can help you achieve your marketing goals and new customers with our social media management services.