Five Techwe are
Jun 18, 2014

The Quick Social Media Audit Everyone Can Do

Kevan Lee, column writer for Buffer.com, a blogging site about all things social media, asks us to examine our company’s presence on social media. It’s surprising how much we can learn from an examination of how we manage (or don’t manage) our online brand. Remember that social media marketing is one of the best, if not the best way to reach out to potential customers.

Social Media Audits Matter for Everyone

Maintaining your company’s presence on social media takes a lot of time, effort, and creativity. It could practically be a full-time job, which makes it difficult if your full-time job requires your time and attention elsewhere. Your company’s social media profiles can lose presence and interest when not being maintained on a regular basis. However, and audit can help get things back on track. For those who consider themselves very active on social media sites and take great effort to keep everything updated and cohesive, an audit can also be helpful to generate ideas and reflect on what works best.

Social Media Audit Checklist

Following a social media audit checklist may be helpful to keep track of where you’re at, and what you’re company should be doing with its social media marketing. Lee provides a helpful checklist of what the audit should cover:

social-media-checklist-815x326

Examine Your Social Media Profiles

Locate all your social media profiles

First things first, where are you online? This may seem simple, and it is. However, outside the big four social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+) what about the more uncommon spots such as Instagram, YouTube, or Pinterest? Perform a general search for your brand on all the major social networks and see where your brand is. Was your brand spammed or are there fake accounts?

Check for completion and consistency in details and imagery

After you’ve found all your social profiles, give them a thorough go-over. Make sure the profiles your company is utilizing have been completely filled out. Social networks offer a lot of customization these days, so it’s easy to miss a spot. For example, are you using the same identifiable logo on all your social media sites? Do backgrounds and other images follow similar themes/branding?

Follow up on your goals and metrics to see how you’ve grown

How are your social profiles performing? Is your social media marketing doing as well as you hope? There are some common metrics you can use to measure your success such as comparing how much your engagement from your audience has increased and your posting frequency. If there any correlation to how often you post and how your audience grows? For engagement, dig into how many conversation you have on a weekly basis. Engagement can include direct contact, retweets, likes, +1s, and reshares.

Determine the goals you want to achieve

When you take a close examination of your profiles, you are going to have plenty of data that shows how everything is performing and where you can improve. For tracking your follower/fan groups, writing down how many followers you have today in comparison to a week/month/year from now can be a simple way to determine interest and attention. For tracking engagement from your audience you can track how many likes, shares, retweets, etc. you get from others.

Examining your social media presence is important because social media marketing is essential for forming a customer base and regularly engaging with them to keep their interest and support. Performing a social media audit for your company’s social media marketing may just be the step you need to take to determine the goals you’ll want to achieve in the future.

If your company would like help enhancing your social media presence, let’s chat and we’ll help you with all your social media marketing needs.

Read the full article by Kevan Lee.