How To Do A QUICK Social Media Audit [Download Free Template]

Social media is not a new tool for online marketing. Today, you will find that each major social media network has become a powerful marketing medium for promoting products, building audiences, and increasing sales.

Looking at the statistics, global investment in social media advertising is projected to increase from US$ 32 billion in 2017 to a whopping US$48 billion in 2021!

Before you get started (or continue) on your social media efforts, it is important to conduct a social media audit to better understand where your brand stands in the entire social media landscape.

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We’ll send you a social media audit template we use for our prospective clients!

What Is A Social Media Audit?

A social media audit is a series of steps taken to assess and optimize your brand’s social media profiles and strategies on various platforms. Conducting a social media audit can help you stay on top of your online presence.

You will collect and analyze detailed data from all your social media accounts when you carry out a social media audit, carefully examining your past strategy, results, audience and financial investments (including ad spending).

Ultimately, you want to find out whether your social media efforts are relevant to your current goals and objectives. This audit can help you identify the little details that you might have missed out! For example, do you still own a Facebook page for an old coaching program that you no longer provide? Have you directed your followers to your new landing pages via social media posts?

To get a complete picture, you must check every aspect of your social media marketing and review metrics such as impressions, reach, engagement and clicks.

There are also other factors that are often being overlooked, which includes:

• The general sentiment of engagement from users
• Average response rates and response times
• Referral traffic to your website from each social platform (e.g. Do some platforms have a higher bounce rate than others?)
• How users interact with you

Why Do Singapore Businesses Need To Conduct A Social Media Audit?

It is easy to forget to check other aspects of your social media strategy when you are busy with content creation, scheduling of posts and measuring results. Performing a social media audit through the analysis of traffic and tracking metrics is one of the best ways to identify new improvement opportunities.

Here’s what we often see: Marketing teams spending hours ensuring that the social channels of a brand looks perfect at the start of a campaign, but rarely reviewing the works regularly afterwards. Imagine using only six hours a week to increase traffic, sales and brand recognition at no cost, if your social media marketing efforts are effective.

For us at Plexxie, conducting a social media audit is part of our 8-step process in creating a social media marketing strategy for our clients.

Social platforms are currently an important part of every marketing approach and their advantages are so great that companies that do not use this cost-effective asset, end up missing a significant marketing opportunity. It is not difficult to realize that effective social media marketing is one of the keys to the success of your business.

Research has shown that 96% of marketers in Singapore use social media marketing. And about 90% of Singapore’s marketers say that social media has generated exposure and traffic for their companies.

Reasons To Conduct A Social Media Audit

Developing or adjusting a social media strategy

Your social media strategy needs to be aligned with your overall business goals and objectives. Each of your goals should be a SMART Goal: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Time-Bound.

Discovering trends

You can find out current social media trends that you may use to create or modify your social media campaigns. When you create a social media marketing campaign, you should bear in mind the specific objectives to make your work as efficient as possible. Here are some objectives to consider:

– Improving brand awareness
– Engaging with your audience to understand them
– Building an audience
– Improving brand reputation

Discover competitors in your space

You want to concentrate on competitors who actively use social media to grow their business. You can use Google search or social media platforms’ search function to find your competitors by typing in the keywords related to your business and your target location.

Understanding your core audience

You’ve heard it multiple times. Not only should you know your audience, but you should also understand them. This applies to every brand and company.

Go deeper into understanding who they are, what type of content you produced so far that resonates with them and why. Understanding your audience is an integral part of the engagement and growing conversation. The demographic breakdown of your audience and their interests will also determine your content style and tone.

Analyzing Content Performance: X content, on Y platform, published at Z time?

You’re going to analyze each channel individually and determine the best mix of content on the right channels at the right timings. You can also use these data to determine if some of the content will perform better when published on other social media platforms.

Justifying social media budgets

Are some paid social media tactics performing better than others and giving you a higher Return On Investment (ROI)? If your past strategy exceeds your budget estimate, prioritize your tactics in accordance with your ROI. You should give priority to tactics with the fastest ROI as they generate instant profit that you can then invest in long-term tactics.

Our Social Media Audit Template

Why Use Our Template?

We’ve seen many social media audit templates that are very complicated especially if you’re not very savvy with social media platforms. We’ve crafted a basic template that usually takes about 30 to 45  minutes to complete and is effective at quickly understanding where your brand stands on the social media landscape.

How to Download?

Sign Up To Our Newsletter Below To Receive The Audit Template!

We’ll send you a social media audit template we use for our prospective clients!

Once you’ve opened the link, go to File > Make a copy or File > Download as

Option 1) Make a copy into your Google Drive

Option 2) Download into your device

If you’re having trouble downloading this template, drop us an email here.

Tools To Use In The Audit

The ability to detect and measure social insights has never been more important and accessible. With the right social media analytics tools, you can understand your data and find ways to compete against the most powerful brands in the world.

Here are some basic analytics tools that you can use and are readily available on the various platforms:

1) Facebook Analytics

2) Instagram Analytics (Insights)

You need to convert your basic profile to a business profile to use this tool (Don’t worry, it’s free!). Although the downside is that this tool only shows you data from the past 7 days or latest weekly data, it’s still a good start!

3) Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics tool to find out which social media platforms your website visitors are coming from. You can see the identity of each traffic source, how much audiences you are getting from that source, how are your audiences connecting to your website and the results of these actions.

Monitor Your Metrics Over Time

Luckily, the audit process is very similar for each social media platform.

You’ll repeat the same steps and answer the same questions across the board – on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Look at the specific metrics that matter to your brand.Do not solely focus on vanity metrics to gauge success.CLICK TO TWEET

As a reference, you are highly recommended to focus on the following metrics for every site:

1. Followers/Likes
2. Top Posts
3. Hashtags
4. Overall Engagement Rate (Past 90 Days)
5. Conversion Rate (if applicable)

What Is An Engagement rate?

The engagement rate is a metric which measures the level (degree) of engagement that a single piece of created content (or multiple pieces of content) is receiving from the audience. It basically shows how many people interacted with the published content.

This metric allows you to understand if your brand is receiving a healthy number of engagements based on your follower count, when compared to similar brands in your industry.

Factors that affect engagement rate includes your follower count, comments, shares, and likes.

The Social Media Engagement Rate Formula (For the Past 90 days)

[Total Engagement of Posts in the past 90 days: (likes + comments + shares, etc)] /
No. of Followers
/
(No. of posts in the past 90 days)
X 100
= _______ %

Breakdown:

1. Take note of the number of content you published the past 90 days
2. Add up all the engagement in the content you published the past 90 days
3. Divide that number by your follower count
4. Divide that result by the number of content you published in the past 90 days
5. Multiply the result by 100
6. The answer is your engagement rate!

The Step-By-Step Process Of Conducting An Effective Audit

Step 1: List ALL Your Social Media Accounts

Create a simple excel spreadsheet (or use our free template) and list all your social media accounts. Include social media accounts your brand has set up but did not use in a while. Double check that you only have one business profile on each platform. Make sure you know all your account passwords and have access to your accounts and related emails. Keep your passwords safe and set up a system to periodically update them.

Step 2: Check for Consistency Across All Platforms

One of the biggest mistakes brands often make are being inconsistent in their online brand identity. Is your brand image consistent across all your social media platforms? Do your accounts comply with your brand’s colors, logo, and tone? Are all username, profile name, and bio or about sections updated? Picture yourself as an ideal customer: can you identify with your brand in terms of the image, tone, and voice on social media?

Step 3: Dig into Your Audience Demographics

What do you know about your audience? Finding data on your current audience will help you to identify who you currently reach and whether they are in your target market. Use Google Analytics and built-in analytics features such as Facebook & Instagram Insights and Twitter Analytics to browse detailed demographic data, including location, interests, age, and gender.

Step 4: Audit Your Posting Activity

Social media is all about working at the right time with the right audience on the right platform. Check how often you post on each platform and take note of the days and timings you usually post. What results do you usually get?

Step 5: Study Your High Performing Content

What type of content did your audience find most useful? Which type of posts did better – video, image, quote, gif, curated content? What about influencer marketing content?

Check your best performing content on all social media platforms. Which content worked best for you? Create more similar contents to the ones that performed better than the others.

Consider how this content can be reused again by making it evergreen. Can you turn it into a series of videos or infographic?

Look into your analytics and find engagement, reach, and virality in your posts.

• Which posts have the most likes and shares?
• Which of them have the largest reach?

As you go through your old posts, try to find any similarities in your best performing content.

• Is there a specific content/topic that produces the most likes or comments?
• What about tone? Are they funny, entertaining, informative inspirational?
• Do you ask for engagement in the posts? For example, do you include CTAs or ask for questions?
• Do you respond to questions and comments on each post, and in a timely manner?

Step 6: Audit Your Competitors

Compare the digital footprint of your competitors to yours. While it is tempting to go straight to the vanity metrics like the number of followers and likes, look more into how many engaging followers do they have through their engagement rate. Look at the type of content created by your competitors. How often do they publish? What are they doing very well in? Most importantly, in which areas can you dominate them?

Social Media Marketing Strategy in 8 Steps

Conducting this social media audit is step #4 in our 8 Steps to creating an effective social media marketing strategy.

You can’t build a house without a blueprint. Same goes to your branding.

YOU NEED TO HAVE A BLUEPRINT. And a blueprint in social media marketing involves crafting a social media strategy.

Watch our video here on how to create it!

Conclusion

If you’ve never carried out a social media audit before, it might be a bit difficult or even intimidating to start. However, if you follow this step by step process and use our template, it will be an easy and eye-opening process.

An audit will help you discover exactly what you are doing wrong and how you can improve it in order to better connect your audience to your content. The end result is a stronger presence of social media fueled by great content.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions!