[[updated February 20, 2018]]
We’re a few weeks deep into the new year, and amid resolutions and personal goals, it’s also important to take a close look at our marketing goals, too. That’s where a social media audit comes into play.
Social media audits allow you to evaluate where you are in progress in your social media marketing, and help you to see where- and how- you can make improvements. While you should este consistently evaluating progress and metrics regularly throughout the year, I also recommend a full, in-depth audit at least once a year.
In this post, I’ll take you step-by-step through the process I use to help my clients audit their social media and develop new strategies to get them where they want to go.
Step 1. Invest in Scheduling and Reporting Software
Traditionally, social media audits can be a huge headache. And when I say huge, I mean ice-pick-migraine-level pain. You’d have to dig into each social media platform individually, download the metrics, and then try to assemble all the data into one report even manually.
Social media reporting software like Agorapulse (which I use for all of my clients) makes the process so much simpler and a little more accurate. It’s not prone to human errors, and it will literally save you hours of time for every social media audit in addition to speeding up your metrics evaluations and analytics throughout the year. The other obvious benefit is being able to create, schedule, queue and directly publish your content across each platform, even Instagram. (Seriously- they even send you emails telling you the best times to post and what type of content is most likely to perform best.)
Set up your Agorapulse before you get started, and give it a bit of time to pull data from your different social media profiles. Once you do, you can begin the actual social media audit.
Step 2. Look at Your Current Metrics
The first step of the actual audit itself will be to pull up reports that detail your performance on every social media channel you’re using. Agorapulse makes this easy, providing us with performance metrics overall, and on specific content.
The global reporting will tell you how many followers you have on each platform, how much your follower count has increased or decreased in a set time frame, engagement, estimated brand awareness, and more.
For every single platform, you should focus on:
- Engagement rates. This matters even more than engagement numbers alone, in many cases, as it shows how relevant your content is to your followers.
- Growth in follower patterns. If you’re on the decline or increasing, you want to know why so you can adjust your strategies accordingly.
- Posting frequency. Sometimes it feels like we’re posting a lot more than we are. Seeing a smaller number for total posts can remind us of that.
- Your awareness estimates. Agorapulse calculates this partially by showing you how many mentions your tweets are getting, helping you extend your reach. If you aren’t getting your name and content talked about on different platforms, your content may not be powerful enough.
- Community management. Find out how well you’re doing when engaging with your community. If you have fifteen replies and you only responded once, that’s something that you’ll want to re-evaluate.
All of these metrics are important. They allow you to examine your community-building efforts from all angles. Even if you post great content, for example,…
