Transcription
Sprout Social describes a social media audit as the process of reviewing your business's metrics to assess growth opportunities and what can be done to improve your social presence. And that's a decent definition, but what does that really mean?
Well, the main reasons we conduct a social media audit are to learn the following three things: [Music] What is a social media audit? How do you conduct one effectively? And why are social media audits important? Hey everybody, it's Brandi from Life Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps small businesses grow. And I am breaking down all of those questions today. But before I dive in, if you're new around here, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on the digital marketing videos that we put out every single week. And like this video if you're excited about growing your business.
Okay, so first, let's define what a social media audit is exactly. Sprout Social describes a social media audit as the process of reviewing your business's metrics to assess growth opportunities and what can be done to improve your social presence. And that's a decent definition, but what does that really mean? Well, the main reasons we conduct a social media audit are to learn the following three things: How many followers am I gaining each month? Are my followers engaging with my content? And am I gaining or losing money from my social media strategy?
Why are these metrics important? Well, the first two metrics, your follower growth and engagement rate, will tell you if the content you're producing is valuable to your audience or not. Depending on the nature of your business, value will mean different things because it depends on what your target audience thinks is valuable to receive from you. For example, value to your audience could mean free sample-size products, free trials on your service, helpful advice or information that enables your audience to accomplish something, or something as simple as entertainment, like is your content funny? Determining which social media posts have the most engagement, such as likes and comments, will tell you what your audience likes seeing from you the most. Understanding that kind of information is beneficial for you to know and apply across the board, and not just in your social media efforts. All of your content and ads should be created with your target audience in mind.
Now, the last metric we talked about, am I gaining or losing money from my social media strategy, probably doesn't need an explanation as to why it's important. But you'd be surprised at how many people fail to actually measure this. If you're investing money, or time, or both, into a marketing strategy, you want to know that it's paying off, right?
So now the question is, how can you tell? How do you conduct a social media audit? Well, I'm going to show you a couple ways. First, if you're using a scheduling platform like Social Report, Hootsuite, Later, etc., they often come with their own analytics built in for you to look at. But let's say you don't have a social media scheduling software or an analytics software, what can you do? Well, you can always check the social media platform itself for analytics. Now, a third-party analytics software will usually give you more insight, but you usually pay for it with a pricing plan. So let's look at what the social media platforms are offering for free.
Let's start by looking at our Instagram account as an example. Because we're a business account, we see the option to view insights on our profile page. When I tap that, it gives us an account overview to review, and we can toggle between viewing the last seven days and last 30 days. It shows us accounts reached, content interactions, and you can take a deeper dive into looking at your audience and content shared. In your audience analytics, you can learn more about their demographics, what hours or days of the week they're most active on the app, and more. In your content shared analytics, you can filter to see which posts have the most engagement in a given time frame. You can filter by likes, reach, impressions, and so much more. You can also then filter by videos, photos, carousels, etc. And you can also look at individual post analytics by tapping on any post and tapping view insights.
Similarly, you'll see that other social media platforms also have their own built-in analytics dashboards for businesses. Here is a quick look at Pinterest analytics, here's a quick look at Facebook page analytics, Twitter analytics, and LinkedIn analytics. And if you're running ads on any of these platforms, they usually have a whole separate analytics dashboard just for your ads. For instance, Facebook has Ads Manager, LinkedIn has Campaign Manager, Twitter has Twitter Ads, and Pinterest has Pinterest Ads. So that's where you can find all the information.
Now, what do you do with it? Well, at minimum, you can calculate it the old-fashioned way. Whoa, wait, no, no, not that old-fashioned. Can we fast forward a little bit, please? There we go. I'm talking about using an Excel sheet or a Google sheet and a calculator. Or you might not even need a calculator if you're a pro with Excel sheet formulas. But what you'll want to do is start inputting your metrics for each platform each month. And then over time, you can start calculating how many followers you typically gain a month on average, if your engagement rate is increasing or decreasing, etc. Studying these numbers over time will tell you if what you're currently doing is producing the desired results or not.
And you can do the same thing with your ad spend. Some social media advertising platforms are more advanced than others, but at minimum, you should be able to see how much you have spent for engagement, leads, conversions, etc. The only trick with tracking revenue from social media ad platforms is that you do have to set up conversion tracking first. So comment down below if that's something you'd want to see, if you'd want to see an in-depth video from us explaining the process of conversion tracking. But for now, assuming that your ad account is set up properly, your ad account will show you the money spent versus the money made from any given campaign. This takes all the guesswork out of wondering if what you're doing on social media is paying off or not. You can see the numbers in your analytics plain as day.
Now, the last tip I'll share in regards to conducting a social media audit is that before you do anything, you need to first determine what your goals are. What are you auditing? I share that at Life Marketing, we typically look at our follower growth, engagement rate, and ROAS, which is return on ad spend. But you first need to determine what's important to you. We made a whole video on how to set strategic social media goals, which I'll link here. But in general, you need to first set your social media goals so that you know what to track and therefore what to audit.
Here are some additional metrics you can track that can fall under the umbrella of engagement metrics to audit: times that you publish your posts, what days and times perform best, video views, like what's the cost per view, and which videos are performing best, link clicks from your social media pages to your website, what's your CTR, number of tags or mentions you get, like how many people are tagging your account in their posts.
Now, some less obvious things to audit for may be less metric-related and more quality-related. Here are some examples: Did all of my posts publish correctly and as planned this month? Are we seeing a lot of grammatical and spelling errors in our content? Are all of the comments and direct messages we receive getting responded to properly and in a timely manner? And to take that one a step further, are the comments we're receiving positive or negative? Is our profile bio filled out appropriately? Do all of the links on my social media page work? Do all of my social media pages look consistent and unified under one brand? Again, you'll want to decide what you want to audit your social media for based on your specific goals. But in general, a social media audit helps you identify areas of opportunity, what's working well, and what can be improved. Conducting a social media audit gives you better insight into what you need to change in order to achieve your goals.
Now, let's go ahead and recap what we've learned in today's video. Social media audit was defined as the process of reviewing your business's metrics to assess growth opportunities and what can be done to improve your social presence. Common metrics that are used to audit your social media are your follower growth, engagement rate, and ROAS. You can use third-party analytics software to track your data or use the analytics available within the social media platforms themselves. And lastly, additional metrics you can track based on what your social media goals are.
Okay, that's it for today's video. Please subscribe to our channel and like this video if you haven't already, and we'll see you in the next episode.