Performing a social media audit for your organisation is a fantastic way to dive into your social strategy by getting down to the frontline of your accounts and analysing the data you find there.
As social media becomes more integral to organisations, it’s easy to lose track of what accounts you own, who has access to them and how they’re performing. Taking the time to complete a social media audit at least once a year is so crucial to stay on top of your most public brand assets.
Not every social platform works the same for every organisation, so by regularly taking stock of your accounts, you can reduce the time, energy and resources wasted on strategies that aren’t helping you achieve your goals.
To get you started on your own audit, we’ve created a high-level overview of the critical factors you need to consider. For a more in-depth view and the full list of steps we recommend, as well as a full audit template – download our Complete Guide to Performing a Social Media Audit!
What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is the process of evaluating what’s working well, what’s not working, and identifying opportunities across each of your social media accounts. They give you a clear picture of your current efforts, and help to shine a light on the best way forward.
This might sound like a pretty daunting task, especially if you have a lot of social media accounts. But don’t be fooled, it’s not as difficult as it seems and the insights you’ll get are well worth it!
Audits should be a proactive effort. Don’t wait for something to go wrong on your social media; otherwise you won’t have anything to compare it to! Schedule an audit as often as you feel is right for your organisation, but aim for once a year as a minimum.
We’ve put together the 8 most important things to consider when starting out on your social media auditing journey!
1. Where Will You Store Your Audit Findings?
To get started on your audit, you’ll need a spreadsheet to work to and store results in. This will give you an informative document that has all the vital information on every social media account, stored in one place for a single point of reference.
You can build your own spreadsheet or use our tried and tested template that you can download for free and customise for your organisation.
If you use your audit document to keep a record of login details, make sure that it is saved in an appropriate location and only accessible by authorised team members.
2. How Many Social Media Accounts Does Your Organisation Own?
In larger organisations, it’s easy to end up with lots of different social media accounts. Some you’ll be aware of and some you might not even know that they exist! These could have been set up by different teams in your organisation, imposters that are not affiliated with you or even unhappy customers that want a platform to complain about you.
To make sure you catch every account related to you:
- Check all social media platforms and find accounts with your name. Look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit.
- Check search engines by searching your name and seeing if any other social media accounts appear in the results.
By identifying all accounts related to your organisation, you have a full overview of your social media presence. You can also use this to identify gaps in your presence and evaluate whether you should build accounts on missing platforms; if it will benefit you and your audience.
Top Tip: To prevent more social media accounts being set up without permission, make sure you add it into your social media policy or employee policy.
3. Who Has Access to These Accounts?
Once you’ve got a list of your social media accounts, it’s time to investigate who has access and is managing them. You might be able to tell this from interactions on the page, or you might have to ask colleagues for the login information.
If the account owner has left your organisation, you should try contacting them to see if they still have the login details to pass onto you. If not, the only way to gain access is to contact the social media platform directly.
Be sure to record all details in a safe place as you go, so you never lose access again.
Top Tip: Once you have access to all your social media accounts, you can safely manage ongoing access by providing your colleagues with their own logins and passwords to a tool like SoCrowd.
4. Which Accounts and Users Are Set up in Your Social Media Management Platform?
If you’re using a social media management platform like SoCrowd, this is a good point at which to cross-reference your list of accounts with which users and accounts you already have in your management platform.
It’s natural to find that some users or accounts aren’t plugged into your social media management. Take the opportunity to add in anyone that is missing so that when you’re ready, you can restrict native social media access. If all your colleagues access social media through the management platform, you can monitor and control your social assets much more efficiently!
5. Is the Branding of Your Accounts Consistent and Are They Set up Correctly?
Now you’ve identified all your accounts and who can access them, let’s look at what’s in them.
Your brand should be instantly recognisable on all your social media accounts, and they should be consistent across all the platforms. You want visitors to be confident that they’re on your official accounts!
Here’s our checklist for keeping your brand consistent on social media:
- A high-quality profile picture and cover photo
- Consistent naming convention across all accounts
- A catchy bio that is optimised for SEO
- Up-to-date contact details
- Accurate location tagging
- Correct call to action buttons
- Relevant pinned posts
The information in your bio can be slightly different across your accounts, but they do need to convey the same brand message.
You can find more detail on each of these areas in our Complete Guide to Performing a Social Media Audit – click here to download it!
The Redrow Homes Twitter and Facebook accounts are a fantastic example of consistent and cohesive branding that brings all their pages together.
If you came across a Redrow Homes account on social media, you would immediately recognise the red logo and know you were in the right place.
6. How is Each Social Media Account Performing?
The performance of an account is subjective to what you’re trying to achieve with it. If you’re aiming to build an engaged community, accounts with lots of comments and followers would be performing well; whereas an account that gets a lot of click-throughs on links would be succeeding in the goal of getting more website traffic.
Overall Performance
Naturally, not all of your social media accounts will be performing equally. When evaluating each account, ask yourself these questions:
- Why are we using this account?
- What do we want to get out of running this account?
- Does it support our social media goals?
- Are our target audiences using it?
Don’t hesitate to hit that deactivate button on social media accounts that aren’t working towards your goals. Focusing your time and resources on the accounts that are serving your objectives is key to social media success.
With the diversity of social media skills and experience within your organisation, some of your accounts will have less content on them than others. Check the last time each account was active; if it’s been a long time and the audience is small, consider either investing more time and resources, adjusting the account strategy or just closing the account down.
Of course, the opposite is true for very active accounts! What can you learn from these active accounts, and how can you share best practices with the rest of your team?
Content Performance
Make a note of the best and worst-performing content for each account. This gives you a benchmark for future content as well as showing patterns in the type of content that performs well with your audiences. Think videos, promotional material, educational content, images or even GIFs!
Always remember, the whole reason for social media is to communicate and serve your audience; don’t publish content that you hope people will read, publish content that you know people will want to read!
Think about inbound content too; are your audiences posting questions and concerns on your pages? Do you receive direct messages to that account? If so, you may need to think about how best to resource the channel and who to involve to deliver excellent social customer service.
Making Use of Analytics
With the data available on everything you could possibly want to know about your social media accounts, it’s essential to hone in on the metrics that are important to your goals.
If you can, try to look further into what the data is telling you about your content performance. Why is one account getting higher engagement than another? Is the first account posting more frequently, or responding to comments faster, resulting in a more engaged audience?
As you get in the routine of regularly auditing your accounts, you can use your analytics to build up a year on year picture of your social media strategy, helping you see how you’re progressing towards your goals.
Top Tip: Use the reporting and analytics tools within SoCrowd to help you to quickly identify social media accounts with the best performing content and highest levels of engagement while providing insight into your current response times on social customer queries.
7. What Are the Audience Demographics of Each Account?
When you set up a new social media account, you will likely have an idea of the kind of people you’re hoping to attract into your audience. Sometimes, the people that end up following and engaging are totally different from what you were expecting. Social media audits are perfect for helping you understand your audience and tailor their social media experience based on their wants and needs.
Not only can you determine which social media accounts are attracting your audiences, but you can also see how this differs across different social media networks. It’s also useful to make a note of some demographic data, to help you understand what they expect from you.
With an accurate understanding of your followers’ interests and demographics, you can more easily make decisions about how valuable each account is and how you might use them to achieve your objectives.
While each platform has slightly different general demographics, you would expect that your audience’s demographics and interests will be relatively consistent across all your social media channels. If this is not the case, it’s worth checking the messaging and types of content you’re sharing on each network to see if you can create a more consistent online brand experience for visitors.
8. What Actions Do I Need to Take With This Information?
Finally, it’s time to take action on the information you have collected. Think about your current position and what you need to do from here to reach your social media goals. We’ve included some examples of possible actions, based on your audit findings:
- Investigate how you can improve the quality and impact of your social media content.
- Decide if underperforming social media accounts should be deactivated or invested in.
- Think if it’s the right time to create new accounts to fill any gaps in your social presence.
- Remove colleagues who no longer require access to your social media accounts.
- Add colleagues that need to access your social media management platform.
- Update your social media policy to prevent more unauthorised accounts from being set up.
- Establish what social media training you might need to provide for teams across the organisation.
- Adjust your social media strategy and content plans based on audit insight.
Completing an audit is not a one-off process; you should schedule social media reviews as regularly as necessary to ensure your accounts are performing well and working towards your social media goals.
Download our free guide + audit template, so you have everything you need to complete a comprehensive social media audit that supports your organisation!
Have you performed a social media audit recently? We’d love to know how you got on and your tips for getting the most out of it; get in touch on Twitter @SoCrowd!
