How to Perform a Social Media Audit

What is it?

Although it may sound daunting, a social media audit isn’t as intensive as it sounds, it is basically performing a health-check for your various social media platforms. The audit will help you set realistic goals for your accounts and how to achieve them by analysing what is and isn’t working well. It will ultimately make your social media strategy more efficient and effective.

Why Would You Want to Perform a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit will help you understand your audience and where you are performing best. It can narrow in on areas that you are performing weakly, so you can make changes to your strategy and turn your followers into customers. Ideally, an audit should be performed every three months to help you keep in line with your goals.

Conduct a Social Media Audit in Seven Steps:

1. 1. Make a list of all your social media accounts and identify where the analytics are, if you are not already familiar. It is a good idea to keep track of analytics on a weekly basis to understand how well your posts are performing and when your audience is most likely to be online.
   2. Perform some basic admin by ensuring that all logos are the same across your platforms to make it easier for your audience to recognise and follow your various accounts. You may have a different style of writing and vary posts between platforms, but it is important to ensure that your brand identity is strong and consistent.
   3. Check out each page’s engagement metrics and make a note of how your account is performing. If you are trying to grow your followers, assess your total follower count and how many followers have increased over the three month period. On the other hand, you may be focussing on increasing audience interaction with the account, so you can examine the engagement data to see the figures for this period.
   4. Assess where and what you are performing best at and then plan to do more of it. If you are really good at making reels or videos and your engagement is highest with these kinds of posts, then focus more attention here to grow your page. At the same time, look at which type of posts aren’t performing well and assess why. It could be the type of content, or it might not be right for that particular platform.
   5. Take a look at other platforms and see how you could use your strengths to build up an audience where you might not have considered before. If you are great at writing humorous captions on Instagram, you might be able to find some success on Twitter too.
      It may be that you excel at getting clicks on your posts or stories, leading customers to your website or elsewhere. If you are, you may want to look at Pinterest and see how you can adapt your content for that platform.
   6. Check out similar social media accounts that are performing well and evaluate how often they post, what types of posts perform well and which platforms they have grown best on. Make a list of 5-10 accounts that are within your industry and use them as an inspiration. For example, if they are posting a lot of reels with high engagement rates or using their stories to update their customers, this is something that you can use as inspiration for your own account.
   7. Set realistic goals based on what you have discovered from your audit so you can measure the success of these in three months time. The information that you have gathered from the audit will give you direction for the accounts on different platforms and the areas that need improvement.

Conclusion

A social media audit is essential for all businesses and influencers, no matter what size. By adding an audit into your schedule, you are more likely to grow your social media following and increase the engagement rate. The analytics are there to give you information about your account and your followers, so you might as well use it to make your account the best it can be.