Social Media Audit for Digital Marketing

The social media audit is an important part of the digital marketing planning process. Social media is an opportunity for consumers to generate their own content, and many of the top-ranking results of an Internet search will result in social media content – in relation to companies, brands, and products and services. User Generated Content (UGC), for example, Trip Advisor in the Hospitality Industry, is a reliable way of Informing consumers’ decision-making.

So what a digital marketer needs is a tool to audit social media within the competitive environment, i.e. relative to competitors. The digital marketer will be trying to work out the best way to ‘feed’ the digital marketing funnel, and he or she will also need to monitor/measure any discussions about his or the company. This is where a social media audit fits in.

There are certain questionaries which can be adopted for Social Media Auditing Purpose:

1. Who is creating content using the digital medium? Is it you? Is it an influencer? Is it a competitor?

2. Where is the digital content? Which digital media platform is being used for content? Such as YouTube or Facebook.

3. What is the content on the social media platform? Is its textual content, and video, a photo, is it a story, etc? Does it use a ranking system? What is the feedback like?

4. When was the social media posted? How often does it get posted? What was its reach? Was it shared?

5. Why is the content generated? What was its purpose? Is it a campaign, a complaint or simply a user’s opinion?

The next step is to rank and prioritize your observations based on these five criteria.

How important is it to your social media marketing strategy?

Steps to conduct a social media audit

Step 1: Create a social media audit spreadsheet

Your social media audit needs a home, which is why you need a spreadsheet. As you go through audit steps, you’ll see that the spreadsheet will start automatically adding new columns.

To start, create a column for each social network, URL to your profile on that social network, and owner. The “Owner” field may seem superfluous, but it’s actually really important to keep track of this information—it allows you to know who owns the password and who is in charge of posting and engaging with followers on that social profile.

Step 2: Go on a search for your social presence on Google

Go to Google and search your company name to see which social media profiles show up. This will allow you to see if there are any rogue accounts or imposters using your company name. It also gives you the opportunity to find out if the right social media profiles are appearing on in search results.

You can either create a separate spreadsheet to track the results of this search or add a new column—labelled “Shutdown Y/N”—in the original spreadsheet. The purpose of this is to keep track of whether you need to track down an imposter to tell them to shut down their account or contact the social network to ask them to intervene in the matter.

 Step 3: Evaluate your social media profiles

This is an important part of your social media audit. As with your social media marketing plan, you need to constantly be evaluating your social media profiles.

During the evaluation process, create a mission statement for each profile. Make sure each profile aligns with your business goals and objectives. This will help you decide whether being present on that social network contributes to your overall strategy and whether or not it makes sense for your business to keep that profile.

Step 4: Make sure your social media profiles are on brand

Now that you know which social media profiles you’re going to keep, it’s time to check that each of these profiles meets your brand standards for imagery, style, etc.

This means making sure you have a proper profile photo, cover image, icons, bios and descriptions, correct URL, etc.

Read also: You can post in multiple languages at Facebook

Step 5: Centralize the ownership of your passwords

The process of doing a social media audit can help you make sure that all your social media profiles are secure. One way to test this is by centralizing the ownership of the passwords for each profile. For example, you can have your IT department own the key to all the passwords for social media profiles. Then use a password managing tool like LastPass to share access on a need-to-use basis.

Step 6: Create a process

Once you’re done your social media audit, it’s time to take what you learned and create an internal process when it comes to creating new social profiles going forward. Create criteria and take note of who will approve the requests.

For example, take note of:

• The requester
• Who the target audience is
• What type of content shall be posted to this profile
• Who is responsible for posting and engagement