Performing a social media audit is an integral part of creating a social media strategy. By doing a social media audit, you will be able to understand where your brand is currently visible and active online, where your brand needs to be visible, where your brand had inactive accounts and many other important details about your company.

This audit will also show you a snapshot of where your competitors are on social media, which is an important thing to know. By knowing where they are posting and engaging, along with the type of content they are posting, it can provide you with a competitive edge.

After all of this information is compiled, it will help guide you in creating a detailed and informative social media strategy. This will ensure you are focusing on creating the right content on the right social media platforms.

To ensure that you know how to perform a social media audit correctly, we’ve compiled these steps for you. Feel free to add in anything else that you want to track or remove anything that you don’t feel applies to your brand.

What is a social media audit?

The word “audit” can spark unpleasant images of the taxman knocking at your door but in this case, it’s anything but that. A social media audit is the process of researching and compiling information on all of your companies social media accounts, imposter accounts, competitors accounts and fundamental information about all of those accounts. This information is input into one document and is used as a resource.

When creating a social media audit document or filling in a social media audit template, you will begin to generate ideas for your social media strategy. If you already have a strategy, you may be thinking of modifications or ways to improve your strategy because you will begin to notice what is and is not working for you. By doing this, you will maximize your social media efforts and help to increase the ROI of social media.

If everything that you are doing is working, then keep plugging away. Perhaps there are a few new social media platforms or trends that exist now, that didn’t when you began your social media journey? Feel free to add those into your plan and build on what you are already doing.

Follow these five steps to perform the social media audit:

Step 1: Create a social media audit document

The first thing that needs to be done is the creation of a document so that you can organize and log all of the information you research. We recommend that you set up this document as a spreadsheet using Excel, Google Sheets or something similar.

You can track the following information:

• Social media network
• Link to social media network
• Social media handle
• The main person who is responsible for managing this account
• The about/bio information for this account
• Current fans/followers
• If the social media profile is on brand
• Notes section
• Anything else that you deem important

Step 2: Begin social media investigation

The time has come to commence research all of the social media accounts that exist for your brand. The best thing to do is to begin filling in the document with all of the accounts that you are aware of that exists. Next, go to each social media network where you don’t think you exist and begin to search for your business.

If you come across a social media network where you do not have an account or brand presence, make a note of it on your spreadsheet. You may also come across inactive accounts, which are also important to note. An account is considered inactive if it’s been set up but there is no activity on it for more than 30 days.

Once you have gone through each social media network, begin your Googling. Here, search the name of your business and even the name of your products to see what comes up. You may find even more accounts this way.

If you find any accounts that appear to be fake accounts about your brand, make sure to take note. As you go through each account, make sure to document all of the information you find.

Step 3: Account Review

Now that you have all of your social media accounts it’s time to review each account in detail. You want to make sure each account is up to date with your most current cover photo, profile picture, bio, all links, handle, and pinned posts.

Ensure that you highlight or note what accounts are out-of-date so that you can update them upon completion of your audit.

You can even have a separate tab in your audit spreadsheet to track if each account is on brand. Here you can check off what is on brand and mark what needs to be updated.

Step 4: Social media channel selection

If your brand is already on social media, then there is a good chance that over the years new social media networks have become popular or came into existence. There’s also a good chance that you created social media profiles on networks that were once popular that are now closer to a digital ghost-town. It’s now time to make a decision about which social media networks you want to be on and which ones you want to claim. A suggestion would be to claim all account on all social media networks and direct people to the active accounts from the inactive accounts. You can direct them to active accounts via your bio or a pinned post.

Step 5: Research the competition

It’s a good idea to pick three to five of your competitors and check out what they are doing on social media. You want to write down each of their names and head on over to each social media network to see how many followers they have, how often they post and the type of content they post. This will give you an idea of where there are opportunities for your brand.

Next Steps

It’s important to delegate responsibility for social media management so you want to decide who on your team will be responsible for managing these accounts. You will also want to make sure that you store all of your passwords in one very secure place. Once those two things are done you want to begin to create your social media strategy.

 

This process can take a lot of time but it’s important to be as detailed as you can be. If this is something you want help with, connect with us so we can get the social media audit party started. 

Filed in // Social Media, Strategy