A Step by Step Guide to Conduct a Social Media Audit
We all know the importance of having a substantial social presence today, and this blog will discuss why running a social media audit is necessary and how you should do it. But before we dive into why and how, let’s first talk about what it is.
Social media audit can be defined as a process that involves analyzing your business metrics to evaluate growth, opportunities, and steps you can take to optimize your social presence.
Now that’s a fairly reasonable thing to do. In essence, a social media audit helps you find out where your business currently stands, whether or not your existing strategy is delivering the desired results, and what you should do next.
The primary reason businesses run a social media audit is to find out:
- The total number of followers they are gaining every month viz. follower growth
- Whether or not followers are engaging with their content viz. engagement rate
- If they are earning or losing more money from their current social media strategy
What Makes These Social Media Metrics Crucial?
The first two metrics, i.e., follower growth and engagement rate, will let you know whether or not the content you are creating is valuable to your audience.
Now keep in mind that this “value” will mean differently based on your business’ nature. That’s because it relies on what your audience sees as “valuable” to receive from your brand.
For instance, depending on the nature of your business, value to your target audience might mean:
- Getting free sample products
- Receiving free trials of your product or service
- Useful information or suggestion that facilitates your target audience to achieve something
- Or perhaps something as simple as entertainment, like humorous content
Finding out the social media posts that have received the highest engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves) will help you determine the type of content your audience likes to see the most from you.
Having this type of information at your disposal is not only useful for you to know but also to employ across the board and not just in your social media strategy.
Keep your target audience in mind while building your content and ads.
Now that brings us to our third and last metric we discussed above, i.e., whether you are earning or losing more money from your current social media strategy. We think the reason this metric is essential is relatively self-explanatory.
But you would probably be surprised to know how many businesses fail to gauge this metric in reality!
It is pretty simple – if you are putting in your time, efforts, and money into a social media strategy, of course, you’d like to find out if it’s paying off or all that is going in vain.
This again brings us back to our main question – how do you do this?
How to Run a Social Media Audit?
We will discuss several ways you can perform a social media audit. Keep on reading to explore them!
In case you use any social media scheduling tools, you can use their own inbuilt analytics.
But if you don’t use any social media scheduling platform or analytics tools, what should you do?
Well, you can go to the social media platform itself to check for analytics!
While third-party analytics tools typically provide you with more in-depth insights, you also generally need to pay for its subscription plans.
So, let’s find out what the popular social media platforms offer to their users for free.
How to Use Social Media Platforms’ Free Analytics?
Let’s start with one of the most popular social networking sites, Instagram.
Remember, you must have a business or creator account to be able to see the Instagram Insights option on your profile page.
When you tap on it, you will see an “Overview” of your Instagram account along with other metrics to review. You will also see a dropdown option at the top of the page to choose whether you want to view Insights for the last 7 or 30 days.
You can review Accounts Reached, Content Interactions and dive in-depth into Your Audience and the Content You Shared.
Exploring your Audience analytics section will help you learn more about your audience demographics (including top locations, age range, gender), their Most Active Times on the app, and so on.
When you tap on the Content You Shared analytics; it lets you filter your posts to see which ones have received the highest engagement in a given time period.
At the top of the page, you can spot three dropdowns. The first one lets you filter by Any, Photos, Videos and Carousel posts. The second one allows you to filter by likes, reach, content interactions, saves, get direction taps, follows, email button taps, call button taps, impressions, and more. The third and last one lets you select a time frame for which you want to see your insights, for example, last 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, last year, or last 2 years.
Instagram also allows the users to look at analytics for their individual posts by going to any post and tapping on “View Insights.”
Likewise, you will see many other social networking sites come with their own inbuilt analytics dashboards for business accounts.
As soon as your business Facebook page has a minimum of 30 fans, you will be able to access your Insights easily. Simply go to your page and at the top spot the “Insights” tab and just click on it for in-depth insights into your overall performance and engagement.
To access your Tweet Activity dashboard on a desktop or laptop, visit www.analytics.twitter.com and log in to your Twitter account. For iOS and Android users, launch your Twitter app, tap any of your tweets, and tap View Tweet Activity in the tweet detail page. It lets you view impressions, total engagements, likes, detail expands, etc.
To access your posts or articles’ analytics, desktop or laptop users can click on the “Me” icon at the top of their LinkedIn homepage. Then go to the “Manage” tab and under it, click on “Posts & Activity.” Go to any of your posts or articles and then click on the “Analytics” icon present right below it.
Android and iOS users can open the LinkedIn app, tap on their profile picture, go to “View Profile,” scroll down to find the “Activity” section, and then tap “See All.” Depending on what you want to view, tap the “Posts” or “Articles” tab, go to any of your posts or articles, and tap the analytics icon present right below it.
Desktop and laptop users can access Pinterest analytics by logging in to their Pinterest business account. From the top-left corner, locate and click on Analytics and then select Overview. Android and iOS device users can open their Pinterest app, log in to their business account, from the bottom-right tap on their profile picture to visit their profile, and then tap the analytics icon present in the top-right corner.
In addition to this, if you run ads on any of the platforms mentioned above, note that they generally have an entirely separate analytics dashboard exclusively for ads. For example, Facebook Ads Manager (for both Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Twitter Ads, and Pinterest Ads.
So that was all about where you can obtain all the required information. Now, what should you do with all this data? This brings us to our next question/topic – how to perform a social media audit using these social media key performance indicators (KPIs)?
Tips on How to Use Metrics for Your Social Media Audit
Now, at the very least, you can go ahead with calculating it using the old-fashioned method, i.e., using a Google or Excel sheet and a calculator.
And actually, if you are adept at using the excel sheet formulas, you may not even require a calculator!
If you decide to go with the old-fashioned way, all you need to do is input your metrics for all platforms every month.
After a while, you can start assessing the total number of followers you generally gain a month on average, whether your engagement rate is going up or down, and more.
Over time, analyzing these figures will give you a brief idea about whether or not your current strategy is yielding the desired results.
The same can also be done with your ad spend.
While a few social media channels are more advanced compared to others, at the very least, you should be able to view the total amount you have spent on leads, engagement, conversions, and more.
Now, the only point you must bear in mind when tracking revenue from social media channels is that you need to set up conversion tracking first.
However, for the time being, let’s suppose your ad account is set up correctly; in this case, you will be able to see how much money you have spent vs. made from any social media campaigns.
This takes the guesswork out of thinking whether what you are currently doing on social media is getting you the desired results.
The numbers are clearly visible in your analytics.
Moving on, the last but not least tip we’d like to share with you is that you have to first set your social media goals before doing anything.
You need to know what exactly you are auditing. Typically businesses look at their follower growth, engagement rate, and Return on Ad Spend.
But you have to ascertain what matters the most to your unique business and its goals.
Some Additional Social Media Metrics You Might Want to Track
Below we have listed a few additional social media metrics that also come under the category of engagement metrics to audit:
- Your social media posting times (on what days and times your content performance are highest?)
- Your total video views (what is the CPV (cost per view) and which videos perform best?)
- Total link clicks to your website from your social media pages (what is your click-through rate?)
- The total number of mentions and tags you receive (how many users are mentioning or tagging your profile in their posts or stories?)
Now, let’s take a look at some less metric-related and more quality-related metrics you might want to track as well:
- Did all your social media posts upload correctly and according to the plan this month?
- Are you noticing too many spelling or grammatical goofs in your content?
- Are you (or your social media team) responding appropriately and timely to all the comments and messages you are receiving?
- Are the comments or messages you are getting positive or negative?
- Is your business’ profile bio filled out properly?
- Do all the links on your social media pages work?
- Do all your social media pages appear in tune and uniform?
Again, based on your goals, you might want to decide the metrics you want to audit your social media for.
Nevertheless, a social media audit helps businesses spot areas of opportunity by and large.
Running a social media audit will help you understand areas that need improvement in order to accomplish your goals.
Wrapping It Up
That was all you needed to know about conducting a social media audit. Let’s take a quick recap as we wrap up this blog post.
You can define social media audit as a process that involves analyzing your business metrics to evaluate growth, opportunities, and steps you can take to optimize your social presence.
Engagement rate, follower growth, and return on ad spend are a few standard metrics that businesses use to audit their social media. However, one must decide their metrics as per their specific goals.
You can track your data using any third-party analytics tool or check the social media platforms for built-in analytics.
Depending on your unique social media goals, there are several additional engagement and quality-related metrics that you can track.
We hope you have got everything you wanted to know about performing a social media audit through this blog post. So go ahead and get started with it.
Happy social media auditing!