Basically, audits are helpful for everyone, no matter where you’re at with your social media marketing.
Social media audit checklist
Examine your social media profiles
- Locate and document all your social media profiles, official and unofficial
- Check for completion of all details on these profiles and for consistency in imagery and message
- Follow up on your goals and compare performance today to performance one and two years ago
Examine those who do it well
- Find 4 to 8 niche influencers and examine how they manage their brand on social media
- Observe imagery and branding on each of their profiles
- Measure key metrics like followers and engagement
Make an action plan for improvements and goals for your profiles
Locate all your social media profiles
First things first, where are you online? Did you create a YouTube page a couple years back on a whim?
- Instagram
- Pinterest
- YouTube
- Tumblr
- Quora
Look also for unofficial accounts, either those set up by well-meaning employees and users or those created by rogues and spammers. As you locate your profiles, make note of the ones you find and keep track of the following elements:
- The social media network
- The URL
- Your profile name and/or description
- The number of followers or fans
- The date of your last activity
You can throw this information into a spreadsheet to keep it all organized and to give you a starting point for any follow-up audits you might want to perform down the road.
Here is what this section looked like for a recent Buffer social media audit:
Now that you have your list of locations, it’s time to prune.
- “Why are we using this social account?”
- “Why do we want to use it?”
- “What are our goals for this social media platform?”
- “Are our target markets using it?”
Check for completion and consistency in details and imagery
After you have found all your social profiles, the next step is to give them a thorough once-over. Start by checking to see that the profiles have been completely filled out. Social networks offer a lot of customization these days, so it’s easy to miss a spot.
Are you using all three image locations on Twitter?
Do you have both types of logos uploaded to LinkedIn?
To be certain you have everything covered, it might be helpful to open the customize settings on each social network and review one-by-one to make sure that all images, text, and options are being used and optimized.check to see that your branding is consistent across your social accounts.
- Are all avatars the same?
- Do backgrounds and other images follow theme/branding?
- Are all descriptions and URLs uniform?
Follow up on your goals and metrics to see how you’ve grown
- Your followers and fans. See how your audience has grown over time by using tools like Facebook’s page insights and Twitter’s Followerwonk.
- Your posting frequency. Is there any correlation to how often you post and how your audience grows?
- Engagement. Dig into how many conversations you have on a weekly basis. Engagement can include direct contact, retweets, likes, +1s, and reshares.
Again, this information can be organized into your main spreadsheet so you can see quickly at a glance whether or not your profiles are performing the way they should.
One helpful part here is benchmarking. How do these numbers compare to where you were a year ago? Two years ago?
Many stats and tools will go back this far automatically, so you get these numbers with relative ease. For the rest, be sure to document the important metrics today so you will have a baseline to return to the next time you perform an audit.
Examine the profiles of niche influencers and brands
Begin by finding four to eight influencers or brands in your niche. You are likely to already know many people or businesses who exist in the same space as you and who tend to speak the same message to the same audience. If you need help rounding out this list, you can try tools like
Traackr.
Once you have your list, you can go through the same steps that you did for your personal accounts.
Locate the social accounts for these influencers. You may find it helpful to see all the many different places they have a presence, or it could be more beneficial to focus just on the social networks you plan to use. You can make a new spreadsheet to track this or add to your existing audit spreadsheet.
- Branding: How does their overall look promote the brand? Can visitors get an accurate sense of their personality or culture? How have they chosen to use images in header and avatar?
- Popularity: How many followers/likes does the page have?
- Frequency: How often do they post? What do they do on weekends?
- Engagement: What is the number of people talking about the brand compared to the number of fans?
- Types of posts: What topics do they frequently discuss? What types of posts do they use: photos, questions, videos, chats, text? What is engagement like for each of these post types?
Determine the goals you want to achieve
Follower/Fan Growth - You can track this at a most basic level, i.e. writing down how many followers you have today and then seeing how many you have a week/month/year from now. For greater insight, you can use tools to see follower graphs over time. Buffer for business shows this
growth for Facebook and Twitter plus LinkedIn and Google+, which are often more elusive sites to track.
Increased engagement –
Content by type – know which types of content perform best—links, photos, videos, etc. At Buffer, we test our shared content by type,
Here are five of the ones we choose to focus on:
- Referral traffic from social
- Click rate on your social shares
- Your fanpage reach
- Your Twitter followers
- Your social influence score
your audit could also lead to more immediate action plans.
- update your social background images or
- shift your focus to a network where more of your target market engages.
Sure, the long-term measurement of these changes might not be the same as follower growth or engagement, but the improvement made to your profile is right in line with what audits are all about.
Insight into Buffer’s social media audit + a free template for you
I ran through the above audit with Buffer’s social media profiles, and I’m happy to share with you our results and my experience. The full spreadsheet can be viewed on Google Drive, and a screenshot is below.
Here are a few of our takeaways:
- I was really interested to find the Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube accounts for Buffer, so I was grateful that I did a deep dive into the search tools to see what was out there.
- Some banner images needed updating on Google+ and LinkedIn, so I went ahead and copied over the banners that appear on our Facebook and Twitter pages. The Big Four now look much more complete.
- As far as analytics, I was blown away by how much growth we saw from LinkedIn over the past year—over 4,000 percent growth in referral traffic!
If you’d like to follow the blueprint that I did for this audit, please feel free to download and use our social media audit spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhO_gyaQUNXUdEtSYV9RTmItWlpvLUdSOGtvVEhiUWc&usp=sharing#gid=0
Have you performed a social media audit before? What did you learn? I’d be interested to hear your experience and thoughts in the comments.
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