Are you someone who is trying to figure out the effectiveness of your firm’s existing social media efforts? Do you feel that your brand is doing nothing but imitating competitors’ social media posts in the absence of a concrete social strategy and that there is an immediate need to understand your audience behaviour, competitors and trends to formulate a well-thought social media plan that could lead to a positive return on investment?
If you answered ‘yes’ to both the questions, you must read on as this article will walk you through the steps that need be taken to assess existing social networks, web traffic, audience demographics and firm’s competitors effectively as part of social media audit with a view to laying out a well-thought social media plan which is capable of serving the overall business strategy in the best possible manner.
1. Prepare a well-structured spreadsheet for conducting social media audit- The very first step to be taken is to create a document or spreadsheet using Google or MS Excel with appropriate rows and columns with a view to recording information needed to perform the audit effectively. For each social network, you may need to document the following:
a) A link to the social network profile in question (e.g. https://www.facebook.com/rbc/ or https://twitter.com/RBC)
b) Follower count
c) Average weekly activity (i.e. the average number of posts every week)
d) Average engagement rate (i.e. total interactions such as comments, likes, retweets etc / total number of followers*100)
e) The volume of website traffic coming from each of the social media accounts (i.e. total number of unique visitors per social media profile)
f) Contribution of each social media profile to overall website traffic in terms of percentage
g) Conversion rate
h) Audience demographics
i) Competitors’ names, links to their social accounts, their strengths and weaknesses
2. Discover all the social media accounts for your brand – After creating a spreadsheet to record all the relevant information for the purpose of auditing, your next task is to make note of all the social accounts that your brand currently owns.
Additionally, you should search for any social media account that may have been created and abandoned in the past due to absence of social strategy or any other reason on Google and each of the major social networks.
Also, you should try to identify social media accounts that may have been opened by an impostor and could be causing harm to your brand.
After listing all the owned, abandoned and impostor social media accounts for your brand, you should go about making certain concrete decisions. For example, are all the existing owned social media accounts worth investing time and resources into or should we rather shift focus on fewer social accounts with large and engaged community? Make use of social media metrics such as follower count, average weekly activity, average engagement rate, website traffic resulting from each social profile and conversion rate so as to arrive at an informed decision. It will also be wise to think over if presence of your brand need be established on any new social network that is growing fast in popularity among your target audience. Jot it all down in the ‘Summary’ section of your document to put a strong social strategy in place in the future.
3. Review all social media profiles in line with brand persona and brand voice – After tracking down all of your social media accounts on the web and determining which ones to proceed with, your job is to update all the chosen accounts with relevant and keyword-rich information. You should make sure that each of the social accounts displays your brand persona and voice in the best possible way. The following aspects must be worked on before proceeding to the next stage:
a) Please ensure that your cover image incorporates the brand logo and displays brand values in a fairly clear manner.
b) Kindly use the same handle or username across all the social channels to ensure consistency in brand image. Namechk could turn out to be a helpful tool in this matter.
c) Take some time to update profile bio with keyword-rich and branded information.
d) Always link your social accounts to the homepage or any relevant landing page so as to maximize the conversion rate.
e) Please review the pinned posts across social channels to determine if those still hold relevance to your target audience.
Please fill up the spreadsheet with information on what needs to be updated and who will be responsible for the same.
4. Determine what works the best for your audience – Based on the analysis of past performance, you might be able to figure out which posts resonated with your target audience the most on each and every social network which your brand exists on. Make a list of top 5 performing posts for each platform and figure out a trend or pattern that could be used to further improve the engagement rate. In order to come up with a pattern, the questions you should be asking could revolve around the following:
a) Type of content (regular picture, animated GIF, length of the video, infographic etc.)
b) Post length (number of characters)
c) Post style (a quote vs an important statistic)
d) Emojis
e) The tone of voice (casual or formal, passive or active)
f) Headline and description in the link preview
Document your findings in the spreadsheet so as to optimize your future posts on social media and drive the audience engagement.
5. Audience demographics assessment – It is very important to understand who comprises your target audience so that you could produce content which they can often resonate with so as to create an engaged community and increase conversions.
In order to assess the existing demographics, you could start by circulating survey amid existing subscribers to your blog or newsletter, asking them information about what age-group they belong to, what gender they represent, what are the two social networks they use the most and what motivates them to be active on their chosen social media accounts. The collected responses would give you a clear idea as to who you should be targeting. If you do not have an email database of your existing clientele, you could probably use analytics tools such as Facebook Audience Insights to understand the demographics of existing followers.
Depending on your target audience, you would be able to decide which all social accounts should attract the biggest share of the marketing budget. If it is a young crowd you are targeting, you might be focusing your efforts on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. If you are targeting high-income working professionals, channelizing your efforts toward LinkedIn would be a good idea. If your aim is to reach females, you may be looking at optimizing your Pinterest account and boards.
After you are done with analysing the demographics of your client base and audience, you should document the relevant findings in the spreadsheet in the ‘summary’ section.
6. Learn from your competitors – You cannot ignore competition at all, can you? You must analyse how your competitors are faring on the targeted social networks and compare their performance to that of your brand to be able to discover areas of improvement and opportunities.
Try to gain insight into what is working in their favour and what is it that the competitors are not good at by means of analysing their regular updates or posts on social media. Is a brand getting a lot of responses for specific types of post? Is a specific hashtag creating a lot of user-generated content? Is engagement better for video posts than the ones with visually-appealing images? Are too many tweets spoiling the brand image of a competitor? Is the competitor ignoring the comments and questions of the audience?
Once you have jotted down the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors in the spreadsheet, it will help you strategize social activities better. While you would incorporate competitors’ good practices into your social strategy, you would ensure that your brand does not repeat their mistakes ever.
Kindly note that social media audit is an on-going process and must not be avoided in any given circumstance if you would like your social media accounts to produce the desired ROI. In an ideal world, you should engage in a social media audit every three months. This will help your brand remain on track and meet the goals/objectives specified in your social media strategy document.
If you are interested in getting a free social media audit spreadsheet, please feel free to write to us at info@kanatadigital.com.
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