Assessing your social media strategy is a task that should happen with some level of frequency. It isn’t always an easy task, depending on the size of the brand and following, but it’s necessary. Fortunately, there are ways to simplify the process of a social media audit. While it will still require time and effort, you can get help with the heavy lifting. You can also follow certain guidelines to simplify the overall process.
Listing All Social Media Accounts
One of the first steps involved in a social media audit should be listing all of the accounts that you have. This will give you a chance to take stock of your online assets, including the number of followers, the level of activity, and whether it has met any goals that were set in the past as part of your social media strategy. Even if it’s a social that gained momentum years ago, but fizzled out as a platform that people would actually use on a regular basis, you should still list it and make a decision about keeping it or not.
This part of your social media audit doesn’t require a tremendous amount of effort because you can keep it in a simple list. However, you can glean a tremendous amount of information up front with the help of NetBase, a proven leader in social analytics. They can assist you with quickly identifying where all of the conversations regarding your brand are taking place, which can help you narrow down the list.
Analyzing Growth
The growth of your following should be assessed to determine how to focus your resources. This aspect of a social media audit will vary based on how a social platform works. For instance, the number of comments that you receive on Instagram will be more important than the number of shares you receive because of how people tend to use Instagram. It’s simply how the platform has developed over time. That’s not the case with Facebook. The number of shares on Facebook is tremendously important.
When you’re looking at growth, it’s really isn’t about the number of followers. What’s more important is the number of followers that interact with your content. Engagement is a metric that’s far more important than the actual number of followers. This is why a small YouTube channel could be more valuable if it has a lot more engagement.
Assessing Engagement
The way to assess engagement is by looking at the entire picture, including likes, shares and comments, whether good or bad. There will need to be a deep dive analysis of the information, which is something that can be facilitated by NetBase. They can also provide details about sentiment so that you can better understand how people feel about your brand. Part of your assessment should include the frequency of engagement and when it’s highest. This can provide valuable information about any changes that may need to occur in how you manage your accounts.
Reconsidering Posting Frequency
As you gather information during the audit, you will ultimately need to make a decision about posting frequency. The activity of the community will help you determine when you should post and how often you should post. It might be necessary to post more often on some days because that’s when the greatest number of people are online.
Auditing your social media accounts is really a function of your marketing strategy because the kind of information that you focus on will depend on the goals you have set for your strategy. Simply put, you can identify what’s working and do more of it. The opposite is also true in that you can get rid of whatever is not working.
