What is a Social Media Audit?

Social media audit is critical to the creation of a social media marketing plan. The audit becomes more vital as brands migrate rapidly to social media sites to gain awareness and develop a consumer relationship.

Entrepreneurs flood social media networks, but the problem is that not everyone knows how to carry out an audit, others are unaware of this method. Omitting an audit could cause ineffective social media strategies, with rivals imitating your brand.  Social media audit helps entrepreneurs recognize simple metrics to exploit fresh opportunities for their brands, engage customers, and grow their businesses.

This article will relay some valuable information to help you understand social media audits.

Understanding Social Media Audit

Social media audit determines the efficacy of social networking practices.  It provides an understanding of the actions, trends, and competitiveness of the target market and necessary information into your brand’s achievements and shortcomings on social media so you can improve on your activities.

Social Media Today shows a typical example of the insight you can gain from a social media audit with McDonald’s. Let’s take a look.

“McDonald’s large audience definitely plays a role in their success, with almost 70 million followers across all countries, regions, and platforms – a 31 percent greater audience than incumbent Starbucks. With 7,748 brand posts in 30 days, an active audience of 1.4 million, and 104.8 million impressions, McDonald’s uses its enormous following as an amplifier for its social media activities.” 

While important, a large audience alone isn’t enough to guarantee a strong social media presence. McDonald’s uses many other tactics and strategies to ensure their social activity is mature and engaging.

Three Components of Social Media Audit

Audience Analysis.  This analysis allows you to understand your target audience and find your social media opportunities by looking at your followers on your social channels. Once you have this data, you will be able to construct your strategy, creating the right content that matches your audience.  Facebook, for example, provides you with detailed information, such as demographics, interests, hobbies of people, lifestyles, and more for you to use appropriately.

Internal Audit. This Audit is necessary to embark on a new social media program.  A comprehensive internal audit will help you identify priorities by analyzing the results and making modifications. Depending on your marketing goal, you can identify essential indicators such as URL, social network, post frequency, engagement rates, among others, over a period and respond to those indicators.  Then compare those metrics.  For those that are poor performers, they could either be changed or discarded.  Consider scaling those that are powerful performers to reach your target audience.  That will also be great for your content strategy.

Competitive Audience. This data helps you gain insights into your competitor’s successes and failures. You must collect metrics of your rival or an aspirational brand per channel to see what indicators perform better than yours. The role could sound tedious, but this will help you change your strategy and decide whether to build, grow, or maintain your share of voice. Identify what content is performing better than that of your brand.  Then use that information to adjust your strategy. Once you’ve gained insight, summarize your findings. 

There are a variety of ways to summarize your findings, such as the “Start, Stop, Continue,” and the SWOT methods. “Start,” if the actions are productive, “stop,” if they are not productive, and “continue,” if they are doing well. SWOT helps you recognize your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks and is a more methodical approach.

Let’s take a look at the results of McDonald’s on some major channels, as reported by Unmetric.

Image source: McDonald’s 
This data reveals, “They do a fantastic job at creating social media content that takes inspiration from real-time events and major holidays.”

Let’s now compare competitors. 

Image Source: Social Bakers  (Links to an external site.)

The data offers some useful statistics on the total number of Twitter followers for McDonald’s and that of its competitors, Burger King, and KFC. McDonald’s should continue with its actions as it shows a positive outcome.  While this reveals McDonald’s as the top performer in followers, the result may be different on other platforms.   The different audiences on different platforms will cause varying effects for each brand, therefore the message across platforms should be consistent for brand awareness and consumer recognition.

 Conclusion

Auditing your social media activities is a perfect way to help get the right message out to your target audience for your brand.  A big step in your business growth is uncovering those positive efforts and gaining insights into the unsuccessful ones. Also, having transparency into your lead generation and knowing how to rise above your rivals are valuable to expand a brand’s reach on the social media channels, take advantage of opportunities and engage customers.

What’s next!

Need to learn more about social media?  Deepen your knowledge of your social media success by gaining insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) for social media.

Please take a look at my last article. 

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