It’s easy to let your social media accounts go on autopilot, just posting updates here and there without much strategy. But is your current approach working to build your brand, engage your audience, and drive business results? A social media audit is a great way to take a step back and evaluate the effectiveness of your social media efforts.
What is a Social Media Audit? A social media audit involves analyzing all of your active social accounts to assess your performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, look for opportunities, and realign your social strategy with your business goals. By going through this exercise, you can uncover areas for improvement and create a solid game plan for optimizing your social presence.
How to Conduct a Free Social Media Audit While social media analytics tools can provide in-depth data and insights, you don’t need fancy software to do a basic audit of your accounts. Here are some key steps to go through:
- Create a Social Media Account Inventory List every active social media account your business has, including the username/handle and number of followers on each network. Don’t forget to include any old, dormant accounts you may still have lying around.
- Review Your Branding and Profiles Check that your profiles have consistent branding elements like your logo, bio description, brand voice/personality, and aligned messaging. Ensure your profiles highlight what’s most important about your business.
- Evaluate Your Content Strategy Look at the types of content you’ve been sharing and how well it has been performing. Identify your most engaging posts and those that fell flat. Assess if your content matches what your audience wants to see.
- Analyze Your Audience Take a close look at who is following you on each platform. Determine if you are reaching your target audience or if you need to adjust your messaging and outreach.
- Monitor Engagement Metrics How many comments, shares, mentions, etc. are you getting? High or low engagement can signal what content resonates (or doesn’t) with your followers.
- Check Out the Competition Take a look at what others in your industry are doing on social media – both those outperforming you and ones you can outshine. Identify ideas to borrow or differentiate your approach.
- Set New Social Media Goals Based on your audit findings, establish some clear goals for improving your social media performance. These could involve metrics to hit, new strategies to try, or channels to add or remove.
Regularly auditing and optimizing your social media presence is essential for continuously improving and seeing meaningful returns from your efforts. Even a basic free audit can reveal valuable insights to guide your path.
