Effective auditing of your social media presence can bring a whole host of benefits to your business, allowing you to pinpoint problems in your current strategy and find ways to improve the impact of your online marketing efforts.
Thankfully this can be a straightforward process, so long as you consider the following steps as important and are rigorous in turning a critical eye on your existing approach.
Identify the accounts associated with your organization
First and foremost, you need to get a handle on how many accounts you have set up to represent and promote your business on social media. This might sound obvious, but it is all too easy for little-used accounts to fall by the wayside and be forgotten about.
The simplest way to do this is to search online, both via the likes of Google as well as within specific social platforms themselves. Take note of the accounts you find and, if any are not operated by you directly, aim to get in touch with the owners.
After doing this, it will make sense to implement social media monitoring tools, as these can automatically keep tabs on mentions of your brand, and thus prevent any untoward accounts being created which are outside of your sphere of influence.
Make sure official accounts are consistent
The main accounts you do run need to be effectively identical in terms of the way your business is represented and the information which is available to followers.
This involves ensuring that the same image is used for the profile picture across every one, and that you also have an identical handle on each so that customers can find you easily. You should also link to the same sites where relevant, so that people can click through to your product pages or contact info regardless of the platform they follow you on.
Use analytics to pinpoint your top-performing posts
Every social media site worth its salt provides business users with access to in-depth analytics abilities so that they can track how their posts are performing and determine where they are going right and where they are falling short.
Use these tools, or third party social media management platforms, to scour your past posts to find the top five in terms of audience engagement. Engagement is measured differently depending on the service in question, but the general idea is to see not only which posts pushed the envelope in this respect, but why they hit home more successfully than their counterparts.
With your flagship posts to hand, you can then alter your future posting strategies to leverage the opportunity for increased engagement based on cold, hard data.
Rank social channels according to their impact
As well as auditing your individual posts, you should also look at the overarching effect that different social media channels are having when it comes to building growth for your business.
This can be done by analyzing how much traffic the various social accounts you operate are generating for your main website, and how many visitors who do click through are then converting.
As well as providing yet more insights into which aspects of your strategy are working, this will also let you work out how much ROI each channel is delivering.
Switch things up
Ultimately, your social media auditing endeavors should not only indicate how well you are using particular sites and services, but also whether some platforms are better suited to your business than others.
Changing your tactics or even abandoning poor performing platforms altogether to focus your attention elsewhere may be the final part of your auditing journey.