Are you a marketer who publishes on social media frequently but doesn’t have a documented strategy?

Or maybe you document your social efforts but are not sure how your brand is performing year over year?

Perhaps you have been wanting to revamp your brand’s social presence?

Whatever the pain point is and whatever size brand you are, starting 2022 off with a social media audit is crucial to your brand’s social health.

Why Does My Brand Need a Social Media Audit?

Many marketers publish on social media on an ad hoc or as needed basis. However, this method of posting isn’t strategic, based on data, measurable, or consistent. 

A social media audit uncovers the weaknesses in your social media marketing strategy and helps you gain insights on how to do better. It also creates a strong springboard for you to track your efforts each month, quarter and year.

Data is a powerful assistant in making social media marketing decisions and your social media audit will give you a ton of valuable data about your brand’s online presence.

First Things First: Spruce Up Your Channels

Since it’s a brand new year and you’re ready to power your social media marketing strategy, first make sure that your social media profiles are professional and create a great first impression of your brand.

To get your social profiles “up to snuff,” revisit the following components:

• Bio is informative
• About section is friendly and engaging
• Profile and cover images are professional and high quality
• Your URLs are up to date

Get Your Assets In Place

In order for your social media audit to go smoothly, it’s important to line up everything you need so that you can power through the process. These assets include:

• Social channel logins
• Consider using a social media tool
• A template for your data
• Google Analytics access

Metrics to Gain and How to Track Them

In order to glean all the metrics you need for a social media audit, you’ll log into each social platform and your Google Analytics. For those with a budget, many marketers use a tool to gain all of the metrics in one place. If you don’t have the budget, you can do your social media marketing audit manually.

Data will place numeric insights on things like:

• Lead gen (Google Analytics traffic to converting pages)
• Sales (Google Analytics to measure conversions)
• Engagement (Each social platform analytics)
• Clicks (Google Analytics and each social platform analytics)
• Audience size (Each social platform analytics)
• Traffic (Google Analytics)
• Shares (Each social platform analytics)
• Number of posts published (Each social platform analytics)
• Money spent on paid efforts (Each social platform analytics)
• Impressions (Each social platform analytics)

Once you analyze the juicy data from your social media audit, it’s time to make goals for 2022. Your goals should be specific to each platform you utilize for your brand. 

Uncover Top Performing Posts

On each social platform, extract your top performing posts by looking at how many likes, shares and clicks each post gets.

When you have identified your top 3 posts on each channel, explore their commonalities and also what sets them apart. Based on your observations, make a plan to publish posts that line up with your findings.

How Often Should I Conduct a Social Media Audit?

One of the great things about social media audits is that you can compare data as time passes.

We recommend doing an audit every month but if you’re pressed for time, once a quarter is good. We also recommend doing a yearly report and here is a template to help.

The main thing to keep in mind is that regularly performing a social media audit allows you to compare data month over month, quarter over quarter and year over year.

Next Steps

Now that you have the information needed to perform a social media audit, it’s time to get started!

Your audit will help you get a pulse on your brand’s social presence and make strategic decisions so it’s worth your time.

With a little organization and tools like this post, your social media audit will not be tedious and will be worth your time to accelerate your social presence.

When auditing your social media channels, which metric do you consider to be the most important? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!