Social Media Audit: How Should You Do It?

So you have implemented your social media strategy. Now what? No, you won’t sit back and wait for money to come in. Work is just getting started.

Many entrepreneurs become bored and then frustrated after trying to do social media marketing for some time and seeing zero results. A few others see inconsistent results — sometimes good engagement and, at times, negligible activity — but they don’t know what’s going on.

That’s why we do a social media audit. An audit is what you do to examine a process or system. In this case, it’s what you do to look into your social media marketing strategy and find out what’s working. Along the way, you will be able to identify things that work and things that don’t work. You can keep doing the former and discontinue the latter.

Identify social media channels with the most activity.

We tell people to go be on a social media site, because we know which sites have lots of active people. However, we also tell people to monitor each social network. Just because Snapchat or Instagram works for many companies doesn’t always mean they’ll work for you. The nature of your business determines the demographics of your audience. They may be more active on one site than the other. That’s what you’re going to find out. Know your best channel, and spend more of your resources there.

Identify posts with the most engagement.

The obvious truth that you will soon realize is that your posts will draw varying numbers of likes, shares, and comments. After a while, you will see that some posts outshine the others. Some of your posts will have more likes and comments than the others. Some posts will be shared around by more people.

Your job is to monitor activity on your posts and find out which ones engage more people. You’re doing something right on those popular posts with active threads. Compare them to those that have relatively low activity. See what’s the difference. See what elements are present in popular posts that are not present in less popular ones.

Check profile consistency across social media channels.

You may not have to worry about this if you were consistent from the start. However, you probably are one of those people who focused on one or two social sites and then explored a new one but crafted something different in your bio. Maybe you included a new job or business. Whatever your reason is, you have to check your profiles from time to time. If you update your information on one site, you have to update your info on the others as well. Also, use the same name and photo or logo in all your social media channels, so people can quickly recognize that it’s you.

Assess ROI.

Don’t get too caught up in the social media frenzy. Remember, you’re doing marketing, which means you got to see if it’s working. Engagement isn’t the end. ROI is! Eventually, whether you’re converting that engagement into sales is what matters.