Spring is a time of renewal, which applies to everything from your junk drawer to your small business social media profiles. Many of us may be stuck working from home, why not use this time and the spring cleaning season to spruce up your digital marketing efforts?
These six tips will go through how to perform a social media audit, and leave your small business squeaky clean.
Brand Check
Your first point of action for your social media audit is to review all your
social profiles. Brand consistency is vital in establishing trust, awareness and making sure your business is creditable.
Create a list that includes all of your profiles so you don’t miss any accounts.
Once your list is ready, review each social media profile for language, web links, aesthetics, and brand voice. Use these 3 questions to help:
- Is your profile photo the same on every profile?
- If applicable, is your cover photo or header image consistent?
- Are your bios, URL links and descriptions identical?
You should be able to answer “yes” to these questions above. If any one is off-brand or out of sync, update it.
It’s all about the details on your social profiles, and even one overlooked spelling error or broken link could impact it.
Review Your Goals
It’s important to track your social media marketing, as it can provide valuable data and help in planning as well as adapt your future marketing for better results.
If you don’t have goals to measure your efforts against, that’s ok – take this opportunity to set a benchmark for your business and decide on goals moving forward.
They do not need to be extremely detailed, but assigning an engagement rate and increase in users by channel are two metrics that will serve you fairly well.
Review Monthly Activity and Engagement by Channel
If you use a social media marketing tool, you can look at monthly posting trends, or you can manually view your accounts and tally your activities.
To get an accurate gauge of what’s typical per channel, review the past three months. From there, you can settle on an average monthly number.
Now that you know where you stand on activity, it’s time to investigate engagement. Engagement is one of the most important metrics for social media. Engagement will show whether or not your content is of interest to your followers.
Several social media channels have free insights and metrics that do the work for you – simply go to your dashboard or profile on each account and review the same period you did for posting frequency. Map this against the amount you’re posting per channel and you can evaluate where you’re getting the greatest return on investment.
Check Your Competitors
If you’re looking for inspiration or want a competitive analysis, research your top three competitors.
Check out their social media profiles and determine what they’re doing well, and how your efforts compare against theirs. This will allow you to see where the holes are in your competition’s social strategy can give you a leg up, and instantly actionable social media ideas.
If you’re just starting out, investigate other reputable brands you admire and that share similar values. Learning from others and scrolling through their feeds can provide you with the vision you need to boost your social media marketing efforts.
Create A Content Calendar
If you don’t already use a content calendar, it’s time to start now.
A content calendar will provide you with a central place where your social media strategy can live – it should house your campaigns, quarterly themes, daily posts, upcoming holidays, and whatever else might be helpful in your your social media marketing efforts.
A content calendar is a tool meant to streamline your efforts and keep everything in one location. You’ll never lose track of a campaign or holiday again by utilizing a designated content calendar.
You can create your own custom calendar on a tool such as Trello or use HubSpot’s free template.
You’re only five steps away from taking your social media marketing to the next level.