Many people hear the word “audit” and immediately think of days spent tediously trawling through ledgers and receipts. And while that is often the case for tax audits, social media audits are a whole different story. In fact, they are actually exciting and essential check to ensure your social media efforts are paying off.
Here’s a quick 5-point social media audit checklist anyone can follow:
1. Locate all your social media profiles
Chances are you created lots of social media profiles in the beginning and some of them will have undoubtedly fallen by the wayside. Check as many social networks as you can and find all the accounts out there that relate to your business. You’ll probably be surprised how many there are – accounts you created and forgot about or lost the password for and others setup by well-intentioned employees.
Put all of the information you find into a spreadsheet for future reference/future audits.
2. Check your profiles for completion and consistency
It’s a good idea to make sure all your profiles are portraying your business in the same light. Some (usually the older, neglected ones) are likely to have different information to your more current ones. It’s also sensible to have the same main profile picture across all your accounts. This reassures your followers that they are connecting with the right accounts and instils familiarity.
3. Review your goals
How are you doing? When you started your social media journey you will have had goals you wanted to achieve along the way – x number of followers, shares, retweets, likes, etc. Are your profiles still attracting new interest or have they become stuck in a rut?
4. Check out what others in your industry are doing
Your competitors will almost certainly have social media profiles too, and their accounts can provide you with a lot of useful information – how often do they post, what types of posts do they favour, how many followers have they got, what are their levels of engagement like, etc.
5. Figure out where you want to go
You can now start working on a plan of action using all the information you’ve gleaned. Perhaps you want to grow your follower count further (who wouldn’t?) and the key to achieving that could lie in utilising different types of post, changing your posting frequency and/or timings.
Your quick social media audit should help you realise where you are right now and where you want to be going forward.
