10 Questions to Address in Your Social Media Audit
These are ten questions that should certainly be addressed when conducting your social media audit.
A social media audit can be an extremely valuable practice. It can provide you with some insight into your strengths, indicating where additional resources should be invested, as well as showcase weaknesses where you need to improve upon your performance or restructure a part of your strategy.
These ten questions are valuable inclusions in any social media audit, because they require you to take a step outside of your ownership and look critically at what you have done, what you are doing and what you would like to do.
On Your Business
Have you aligned your goals on social media with the goals of your brand in general?
Keep in mind that social media is a tool that should be used to achieve business goals. Superficial or quantitative goals like a growth in audience size are good to have, but the focus should be on how social media is helping your brand achieve business goals in the short and long term.
Are the right departments involved in the use of social media?
As with the point above, marketing is only one department where social media can have an impact. As a business, you might find that increased operational efficiency is a goal that social platforms can help obtain. In that case, determine which departments need to be leveraging social channels and make sure that they are doing so properly.
Do proper strategies exist for each of these departments, and are these strategies being adhered to?
Once again, building off the last question, it is crucial that for each department where it has been determined that social media can be useful, a proper strategy has been developed and is being executed efficiently.
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On Your Analytics
Do you have measurement criteria in place for all of your goals?
You have a set of goals that you are trying to achieve with the use of social media, and in order to measure those goals, you need to have certain measurement criteria in place for each one. Make sure you know what you are measuring for and that those measurements are being carefully evaluated.
Do you have measurement tactics in place for all of your KPIs?
Not all KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are easily measurable. As noted above, you might be able to look at purely quantitative results with ease, like the growth of your audience, but others might be trickier. Determine what a successful benchmark is for each KPI (discussed in the following question) and be sure that you have a process by which that benchmark can be quantitatively and qualitatively measured.
Are you surpassing your benchmarks?
Just because you can measure your results, it does not necessarily mean that your results are always positive. Pay attention to whether or not you are achieving or, better yet, surpassing benchmarks. At this point, reset your benchmarks to new levels and ensure that you are working towards surpassing those before your next audit.
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Have your test runs succeeded or failed?
As noted in the question above, at each point of the audit you’ll need to be setting up new benchmarks and testing new criteria to see how it performs on social media. Then, at each subsequent audit, you’ll need to evaluate your tests to see if they should be implemented on a full-scale basis or scrapped from the program entirely.
On Your Audience
Have you sufficiently defined your target social client persona?
Your target social client persona is the person (not just demographics or archetypes, but more or less a definition of an individual) that you are trying to engage with your program or individual initiatives. In running your audit, evaluate if you have targeted the right client persona, or if there exists an opportunity to target new demographics based on spike in individual engagement rates.
On Your Budget
Have you reached your ideal results with the budgets you have allocated to social media campaigns?
There are several metrics to consider when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of your budgets. What’s more, these criteria can be very useful in determining the need to increase or reallocate budgets. They can also help you determine if your campaigns are effective in driving traffic, your audience is properly targeted or your landing page properly optimized. For example, a high click-through rate and low cost-per-click are great, but if you are not generating conversions, you might need to change your target audience or properly optimize your landing page for the remainder of the campaign.
On Your Tools
Are you tools acting as complements to one another, or against one another?
You will always want to ensure that your tools are working as complements to one another. Ideally, tools will be able to produce reports and provide value that, together, help you achieve your goals in the shortest, more cost-efficient way possible. In your social media audit, it will be important to evaluate the tools you are using in order to ensure that they are working for you and not against each other.
Conclusion
A social media audit is going to be a valuable component in any strategy. It is extremely important to spend time whenever possible evaluating how you are performing on your networks and with regards to your strategy as a whole. These are just ten questions of the dozens that might be asked when conducting a social media audit, but they are important ones that should be included in virtually all cases.
What questions do you ask when conducting a social media audit? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
There are plenty of articles, books and white papers that lay out social marketing strategies. But sometimes, the best strategy is knowing what to never do on social media. Acquiring new leads and customers is a difficult, labor-intensive task. But losing them can be as simple as not knowing what you should stay away from.
Never Ignore Your Audience
