Are you using your social networks effectively? Audit them.

The social media waters are changing daily, therefore it’s important to keep up and even get ahead. How? Audit your social media and find out on which platforms it’s efficient for you to be active if your communication is right and sufficient in terms of competition.

What you should look into

Before you start

Before you start with the audit, make sure you are clear about the goal of your communication on social media networks. Are you trying to increase brand awareness, get leads, increase the number of sold goods or something else? Any goals you may have, you need to define them.

Where does the brand communicate?

Make an overview of the social media channels your brand uses. Evaluate which ones are relevant in terms of your target groups and how much percent of your customers actively utilize the given platform.

Based on that, decide where you should end or constrict your communication and on the contrary, where should you invest more time and money. Maybe you’ll find out you should test new waters.

Are profiles on all social networks consistent?

Go through the profiles of your brand on all social networks and make sure the info is identical and correct. The point is for people to be able to find your brand on all social media networks. The same name and profile picture will make the search easier, e.g. Facebook.com/kontentino instead of facebook.com/48923578395742.

Audience analysis

An important step is analysing the audience on social networks. Is your target group the same as your fans? If not, you probably target your ads wrongly or create the wrong content. Think about what content is interesting for your target audience and try and create your posts according to that.

Audit your content

Are you creating your own content, do you utilize user-generated content or even share other pages’ posts? What post types prevail? If your communication goal is predominantly page traffic, link posts linked to your web should be dominant. If you have a photogenic product, use images/videos. Is your target group prone to interactions? Try polls for example.

A common question is also the post frequency. Audit your communication intensity. Do you post once every few months or do you ‘flood’ your fans with posts every day? The frequency depends on your subject and communication goal. For example, news sites have to post several times a day to keep the topicality of the information and keep the readers’ interest. If your communication is explicitly brand-oriented, don’t flood people with tons of bland posts about how amazing your product is. Rather than that, post with lower frequency and invest into the quality of the post which depicts the product’s feature in an interesting way. After that, reach the biggest possible target group with it.

What about the budget?

Even when it looks like it’s impossible, there are still some poor souls that count on organic reach. Social networks aren’t free, think of them as any other media space. Set your budget based on what percentage of your target audience you need to reach to meet your goal. Obviously, the budget also depends on the number of posts you want to publish. Therefore if your budget is lower, don’t create too many posts.

Details matter

When auditing, don’t forget such ‘details’, as the right sizes and formats of images and videos, their quality, the right tone of voice and using shortened URLs in post texts.

Last but by no means least

The last, but the most important point of the audit – to know the rules of specific social networks you communicate on. Isn’t your competition against Facebook’s rules?

Of course, you can audit other stuff until you drop. I recommend starting with these 7 steps and the next time we can dive deeper.

Happy auditing!