Performing a social media audit is a great way to take an objective look at all of your company’s social media channels and profiles. You can take all of the information you gather during the audit and use it to help you create a more targeted strategy to succeed on social media.
You should plan to perform a social media audit at least once per year or every 18 months, depending on your business and channels. This will help keep you on a schedule and you won’t get too far off-track before the next audit.
By creating a template, you can get through each audit faster, but you can also easily compare apples to apples when you look at the template year-over-year. Create your social media audit template using a spreadsheet. Here are some things you’ll want to include in the spreadsheet:
• The URL for each social media profile
• The owner for each social media profile (or whoever is responsible for posting)
• Do a Google search for any social profiles that may be representing your company that you don’t own. These could be imposters. If there are any, make a separate spreadsheet for these profiles.
• Create a mission statement for each of your social media profiles and put that in your spreadsheet
- • Make sure all of your social accounts are branded. Look at the:
o Profile images
o Cover photos
o Icons
o Bios
o Descriptions
• Clear up any confusion about social media passwords
- This could be giving all of your passwords to your IT department, or keeping them in a central file where everyone who needs access can get to them
• Create a process for how new channels will be created from this point forward
• Create a process for how new channels will be created from this point forward
If you come across any social media profiles that are impersonating your company, be sure and report them immediately, especially if they are posting negative things about the business and affecting your online reputation.
Make sure any of these online profiles aren’t simply just profiles that were started and then abandoned at some point. If they are abandoned profiles that you need to recover and cleanup, you’ll want to contact the platform right away and take any steps to regaining control of that profile as soon as possible.
Because this is a template you’re creating, you can choose how much information you’ll want to include in it. If you put everything listed above in your audit, you’re off to a great start. Here are some other things you might consider adding to your audit spreadsheet:
– Date created: Record the date each social media channel was created and you can compare improvements or drops over time.
– Number of followers: If you get on a regular audit schedule, it might be worth recording the number of followers each channel has during the time of the audit, then you can compare date-overo-date.
– Channel demographic: Make a note of the demographic for each channel. Note that this may be a different demographic than what’s typically associated with the channel.
– Goal(s) for each channel: If you have specific goals for each channel, record those in your audit spreadsheet so they’re all in one place. Plus, you can start to connect the dots and see if you’re getting closer to reaching your goals.
– Date last posted: Hopefully, you’re posting at least once per day on each of your channels, but that may not be the case. If regularly posting is an area you’re looking to improve, add a section in your spreadsheet to keep track of when the social media channel was last updated.
– Most engaging post to-date: This is another section you might consider adding if you’re planning to get on a regular auditing schedule. This way, you can compare your most engaging posts audit after audit and see how similar they are.
– The time of day the most successful posts are published: This will help you determine why your posts are successful; is it the actual content or the time of day it was published? Or was it something else entirely?
– Number of posts per day: Make a note of how often you post each day on each channel to see how much it changes over time and how that affects your success.
– Effective keywords: Make note of any keywords or hashtags that seemed to have helped (or even hurt) your posts.
– Response rate: When it comes to replying direct messages and public ones, what is your average response time? Create a goal for responding on social media within a certain number of hours, or even minutes.
– Any additional notes: Add a column in your spreadsheet to include any additional notes from the audit. If the notes are similar after several audits, you may have to add more specific columns to address the issue(s).
Once you’ve created your template and conducted your first social media audit with it, you’ll start to gain some insight into what is working on these channels and what isn’t. You may also ask yourself some additional questions, based on your findings from the audit:
• Should you be spending more or less time posting on social media? Is this for a specific channel?
• What are the best overall posts on each channel? How can you leverage this information to help you with future posts?
• Are there any posts on any of your channels that didn’t do as well as you expected them to?
• What is your competition doing? How often do they post and what posts of theirs are doing well?
The best way a social media audit will work is if you remain open to seeing the real results (not just the ones your boss will like) and are flexible enough to adjust your social media strategy according to the audit results.