Kickstart Your Year With This 5-Minute Social Media Audit
Adaptability is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. When marketing ideas become stagnant, the strategy starts to lose momentum. This is particularly true in the context of social media, where trends and user behaviours are perpetually changing at a rapid pace.
Yet, despite this reality, countless businesses set their social media marketing to auto-pilot, taking the same standardized approach for months or even years.
If your social media marketing is stuck in a groove, consider this a word of warning! The longer you wait to breathe new life into your online presence, the harder it will be to maintain traction and reach your goals.
But here’s the good news— now is the perfect time to review your social media content and greater overall strategy. January is just around the corner. By taking action today, you’ll give yourself the best chance of achieving your desired results in the New Year.
And the most exciting part? All it takes is a quick 5-minute social media audit!
I’ll guide you through the simple steps required in just a moment. But first, here’s what you need to know about auditing social media pages:
The Purpose of a social media audit
A social media audit is essentially an inspection for your online presence. It’s meant to tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and where you can shine brighter, so you can ultimately improve performance (and profitability).
The benefits of a social media audit
Social media audits provide a wealth of information, which allows you to make data-driven decisions about the future of your marketing efforts.
When you perform a social media audit, you’re able to analyze:
1. Who Your True Target Market Is
Many brands and businesses assume they know exactly who their followers are— not taking into account audiences change and evolve over time or that audiences tend to vary from platform to platform.
By diving deep into the audience analytics of all your social media accounts, you can gather the most recent and accurate information about who is supporting your business online.
2. Which Social Media Platforms You Should Focus On
Conducting a social media audit is the best way to determine where your efforts are paying off and where you might be shouting into the void. By measuring key metrics like engagement rate, audience growth rate, and virality rate, you can identify which platforms provide the biggest return on your investment.
3. What Types of Content Resonate With Your Online Community
Every audience is unique. The way your audience prefers to consume online content may not be the same as that of another brand. Auditing social media accounts and pinpointing the types of content your audience responds to most favorably will allow you to fine-tune your strategy and better appeal to your ideal customers.
How to Do a Social Media Audit
You know what the point of a social media audit is and how it can benefit your business. Now let’s get to the juicy bit— how to perform one in just 5 minutes!
Here’s my super simple 5-minute social media audit checklist:
1. Evaluate Content Performance
Before anything else, you’ll need to assess the performance of your social media content from 2023. You can do this by accessing the analytics tool on your chosen platform. (I.e. Meta Business Suite, Linkedin Page Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, etc).
Start by identifying your top 10 posts from 2023 in terms of engagement. Then ask the following questions:
What do these posts have in common?
What format are they in? (Video, image post, text only, Instagram reels, Instagram stories, etc.)
What calls-to-action did you use? (Click here, comment below, subscribe, etc.)
What time of the day and week were they shared?
Who responded to the posts? (Was it mostly men or women? Was it primarily your employees? Was it followers from a specific geographic area?)
The more information you gather about the content your audience is responding to, the easier it will be to replicate the success of these posts in the future.
2. Check Profile Completeness
It’s best practice to review your social media profiles at least once per year to ensure all pertinent information is up to date, including your contact details, logo, service listings, and more.
You never know who might be navigating to these areas of your profile, and you never want viewers to see incorrect or obsolete information. So, take this opportunity to double-check your “about” sections and complete any necessary updates.
3. Confirm Brand Consistency
Businesses often change or refresh visual branding elements like logos, color palettes, and other graphic elements. One of the greatest benefits of a social media audit is that it provides the chance to update your profiles to match your most recent brand guidelines.
Whether it’s an old version of your logo, a graphic with incorrect fonts, or a slogan you no longer use— you’ll want to eliminate anything that doesn’t align with your current brand identity.
4. Monitor Your Competitors
It’s important to track the success of your competition in addition to evaluating the performance of your own content. To do this, start by choosing 3-5 of the leading competitors in your industry. Make sure they’re brands that share your target market.
Next, view all social media profiles for each brand, keeping the following questions in mind:
What seems to be their content niche? (Is it witty captions? Inspirational stories? High-quality videos? Etc)
What is their posting frequency and timing?
What hashtags do they use?
How do they interact with their audience? Do they respond to comments? What conversations are they having?
How do they promote their products or services? What special offers or incentives do they offer?
Be sure to document your findings.
5. Review Policies and Guidelines
Part of knowing how to do a social media audit is knowing what to do with the information you gather. I recommend using your findings to update your policies and guidelines as soon as possible.
Have you been operating without social media policies and guidelines in place? Now is the time to establish them!
Common policies and guidelines include:
Content approval processes
Employee posting policies
Crisis communication plans
Hashtag usage policies
Promotional content policies
Comment interaction guidelines
Content accessibility guidelines
Remember, policies ensure your brand voice stays consistent, your team remains on the same page, and your online reputation stays gold. They’re always worth investing in!
6. Update Your Objectives
After you’ve completed your social media audit, it’s time to use the data you’ve collected to revise your greater marketing strategy. Why? Because data-driven strategies are profitable strategies.
Think about it— you’ve probably spent hours of precious time this year creating content that doesn’t resonate with your audience. But now that you’ve identified the top-performing posts from 2023, you know exactly which posts are most engaging to your audience. That means you can eliminate content that doesn’t work for you!
Start setting your marketing goals for 2024 with your new findings in mind. Ask yourself:
How can I give my followers more of what they want?
Are there any platforms I should eliminate from my strategy?
Do I need to adjust my posting schedule to better align with the findings of my audit?
How can I maximize the traction I’ve seen on my most profitable platform?
How can I adjust my goals to better fill market gaps my competitors aren’t filling?
7. Create an Action Plan
The results of your social media audit will dictate what your action plan should look like. Let’s say, for example, you’ve determined Instagram Reels receive the most engagement, and that evening posts tend to get the highest response rate.
Your action plan based on these findings might be to:
Dedicate two full days per month to filming video content
Hire a part-time video editor
Revamp your content calendar to include three reel posts per week
Schedule all future Reel posts to go out at 7 PM
Stop posting on X (formerly known as Twitter) due to it being your least profitable platform
Start engaging with your audience in the comment section of your Reel posts
Remember, the point of an action plan isn’t absolute perfection. Even if your plan works flawlessly, it will take time to generate consistent and significant results.
The true value of implementing an action plan is the extra data you’ll gain after it’s been implemented. You’ll start the New Year with a fresh, data-driven approach and in a matter of months, you’ll have even deeper insights to base your social media strategy on.
Start the New Year With Stress-free social media management
Tired of going into a spiral when you think about social media content? I’m here to tell you social media marketing should be a breeze, not a burden.
My role as an Edmonton social media manager is to minimize your stress and get you back to doing what you do best— running your business.
But that’s not all. I also sort through meaningless metrics to find the data that actually matters, helping you fine-tune your strategy and drive real, tangible results.
If you’re ready to shake things up, step into the spotlight, and shine brighter than ever with the help of a trusted expert, I can’t wait to hear from you.
If you’re ready to take the next step toward online excellence, I’d love to connect.
Together, we’ll set a new gold standard for your marketing efforts!
Wondering what makes me different from other social media managers in Edmonton?