Conducting a Social Media Audit – John Larson & UNLV Continuing Education

Taking Ownership

Performing a social media audit is a key part of developing – or updating – an effective social media marketing plan. Before you can think strategically about your social media use, you need to document and evaluate your existing marketing efforts.

The audit process will allow you an opportunity to determine what is working for you and what is not. You’ll also identify impostor accounts, outdated profiles, and new opportunities for social engagement.

A thorough audit should also include reviewing your competition.

Step 1: Create a document for your audit (or use the template below)

Before you can start considering a social media marketing strategy, it is crucial that you gain an in-depth understanding of where you are at now. The audit will involve tracking down all of your company’s social channels, as well as any impostor accounts, and compiling key information about each account, all in one place. The best way to keep track of all the information you’ll uncover during your audit is to use a spreadsheet.

Download a copy of this HootSuite worksheet

For each social account, you’ll want to record:

The link to your profile (for example, instagram.com/unlv).
Your social handle (for example, @unlv) or channel name.
The person or team responsible for managing the account (also known as the “owner”—for example, the social marketing team).
The mission statement for the account (for example, to promote company culture using employee photos, or to provide customer service during office hours).
Key Performance Indicators:
- Awareness: these metrics illuminate your current and potential audience.
- Engagement: these metrics show how audiences are interacting with your content.
- Conversion: these metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of your social engagement.
- Consumer: these metrics reflect how active customers think and feel about your brand.
The top three posts (in terms of engagement).
Key demographic information.
Any relevant notes about the account.

2. Finding all of your social media accounts

Start by listing all of the accounts that you and your team use regularly, but don’t assume that will cover all your accounts. There may be old profiles created before your company had a social strategy, accounts that were abandoned, rogue accounts created by people who’ve left the company, imposter accounts, or maybe various accounts created by individual departments within your company that use social media.

Your goal is to create a unified system or list of accounts.

This is also a good time to identify networks where you don’t have a social presence. You might want to consider adding them to your social media strategy or at least create profiles to reserve your handle (brand name) for future use.

3. Check each account for completeness and branding

After you’ve logged all of your accounts (in step 2), examine each one thoroughly for the following:

Profile and cover images

Make sure these display your current brand logo and imagery.

Profile/bio text

Social profiles provide a limited space to work with so it’s important to make sure they provide accurate and useful information. Be sure to make the most them by completely filling out the areas with current brand messaging.

Handle

Are you using the same handle across all of your social channels? It’s good practice to do so if possible.

There might be reasons to create different handles if your accounts serve different purposes like one for general business and a second one for customer support. Examine your handles and record in the notes column if you want to make changes for consistency.

Links

Make sure your profiles are display the correct links to your homepage, any appropriate landing page, or a current campaign.

Pinned posts

Examine your pinned posts to ensure they’re appropriate or determine if they need updating

Your goal is to be consistent with your current branding.

4. Channel ownership and passwords

Each social media account should be “owned” by one person (or team) within your company. This person is responsible for everything – from strategic direction to all necessary approvals including: that the account is on brand target, it’s content is up-to-date, and is hitting performance targets. They will also determine who should have access to the account and at what level of access each person should have.

Account password management is critical. You don’t pass out company credit cards to everyone for a reason – the sames goes for account passwords. One of the easiest ways to manage account passwords is to centralize them in one place. Not only does this add a protective layer of security to the passwords, it also minimizes unauthorized usage. Password management tools like LastPass, Dashlane, or Keeper are great for ensuring the right people have access too.

Log channel owners on your worksheet and indicate whether you’ve set each account up using a tool to control passwords.

5. Mission statement

Your mission statement will help you identify the key metrics to evaluate for each social channel.

Image: Sprout Social / Social Metrics Map

If you’re social media accounts do not have a mission, now is the time to examine the role the social account has in your marketing strategy. It will be impossible for you to evaluate the account performance if you do not know it’s purpose – what are you trying to achieve?

Remember, some accounts will be used strategically and will have different purposes from other other accounts.

6. Evaluate performance (KPI’s)

For this step, you’ll use analytics to gather some key insights about each social account. Choose one or two key metrics for each account and make notes about their performance in your audit worksheet. This step is important in your evaluation – you’ll be able to see which accounts are more effective than others.

Once you’ve identified underperforming accounts, you can decide whether to adjust your marketing strategy, invest more time and resources, or discontinue the account.

7. Identify your best posts

Identify the top 3-5 posts in each account that received the most engagement and record their links in your spreadsheet.

What you’re trying to determine is “why” did they receive the most engagement. Find the pattern(s) that made your audience engage them. Did they contain images? Videos? Surveys? Games? Did your audience respond to the same kinds of posts on your Facebook Page as they did on your Instagram account?

Add your thoughts to the “notes” column on the worksheet. If you think you’ve identified a winning type of post for a particular account, try using that format again and test your theory.

8. Audience Demographics

Just as it’s important to understand how social media supports your brand, it’s important to understand who can be reached via social media.

Each social media channel will attract a different audience demographic. For example: Instagram users tend to be much younger than Facebook users, and LinkedIn users tend to have relatively high incomes than other channels.

You can dive deeper to learn more about the demographics of your specific followers on social media using analytics and tools like Facebook Audience Insights.

Hootsuite has put together the top statistics for each social network in this series of articles. This data will give you benchmarks for each channel and insights on how to use them for your marketing:

9. Deciding which channels are right for your brand

It’s time to make some strategic decisions on were to focus your social media marketing efforts.

By analyzing how each channel is performing and understanding who you can reach through each platform, decide on strategies to use each social account. If the connection is unclear or if the results do not seem worthy of your time and resources, you may want to consider scaling back (or canceling) certain channels so you can focus your energy on the channels that provide the best return on investment.

Nothing is forever and you can always redirect your focus. The important task is to make informed decisions based on research about which channels best serve your goals.

10. Who is Your Competition?

The last step to completing an audit is to check out your competitors. You should identify…

Who are your closest competitors?
Which social channels are they using to connect with their audience?
What are they doing well and not so well?
What content are they producing and how is it performing?
Where do they need to improve on social?

The most effective way to do that is with social media listening. There are literally dozens of tools that can help you, from free to $$$, with new ones appearing on the market all of the time. Here are some options to get you started:

Monitoring the sentiment around competitors’ brands and within your niche is important. This will help you to understand which key industry terms are trending, what content and campaigns audiences are responding too, and how competitors’ strategies are changing over time.

NEXT: Creating a Plan