Performing a Social Media Audit

The concept is simple. A social media audit is an evaluation of what you’re doing with metrics to determine if it’s effective or not. Once you compile some key info, you’ll be left with a clear strategy for moving forward. No matter if you’re crazy active on multiple platforms or you’re just treading water on one, a social media audit is a valuable tool to evaluate what you’re doing and why, and determine a positive path forward.

Step 1: Collect, collect, collect.

You need to evaluate everything you’re currently doing so you can (kindly!) judge what and how you’re doing. Create a nifty spreadsheet or even just use a big sheet of paper if you’re more of a hands-on kind of person. List each social space you’re using, which employee(s) are responsible for posting, and how many followers you have. Look at the past couple of months of content and figure out how often you post on each site.

Number of followers
Likes
Shares
Comments
Clicks
Post type
Video views
Number of posts/week
You might end up with a spreadsheet looking like this:

Now, still looking at the past few months, pull out the three posts that had the best engagement. List them. Look at the insights for those posts and include them in your spreadsheet. Each social space might look like this:

Now, still looking at the past few months, pull out the three posts that had the best engagement. List them. Look at the insights for those posts and include them in your spreadsheet. Each social space might look like this:

Now for the hard part: deciding what it all means. Try to pull together some big-picture conclusions first. Are your followers increasing or decreasing? Are you posting on a regular basis? Are your followers interacting with you?

Then, dig a little deeper into your data. Do you have more followers and/or engagement on one social space over another? What kind of posts (videos, links, photos, status updates) generate more interactions? Do users prefer sales pitches, product information, tips, or behind-the-scenes info? Have you found a particular type of tone (humorous, opinionated, personal) to be successful? Don’t forget to look at your website analytics and see what drives traffic to your site.

At the end of your analysis, you should know the following:

• Which social space drives website traffic
• What kind of posts are most popular
• Which social space has the most engagement

Now that you know more about the users who interact with you on social media, it’s time to create a strategy for moving forward. What will you do with your data?

First of all, it’s possible you don’t yet know enough to create a comprehensive strategy. That’s ok! Your strategy might simply be to post weekly (or daily) and to reevaluate in three months once you’ve collected more data.

If you do have adequate data, think about what your users want. If your users love watching videos on Facebook and clicking through to your site from Pinterest, then post content to help them do that. If they can’t get enough behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram, then make them happy. That’s really what your strategy should be about: creating content that your users like.