Without organisation, your different social media channels can quickly become disjointed and out of sync. Your social media channels are advocates for a brand that never sleep, rest or take days off so it is vital that they are all on brand and functioning to the best of their ability.
It is recommended to audit your social media accounts on a regular basis. Conducting a social media audit is a fairly simple process, once you have set up your initial template, your future audits can be done in a matter of minutes.
Contents
Step 1
Create your spreadsheet. I tend to keep mine in Google Drive as it allows all of my teams access to it. When re-auditing your spreadsheet, it is a good idea to just open a new tab on the spreadsheet to keep all the different copies together.
You will want to fill this spreadsheet with as much information as possible. So we are looking at the branding of the profile, the level of engagement that profile has, the tone and who is responsible for it. If you would like to see what fields I use on my social audits, please feel free to do so here.
Step 2
Once you have your template ready to go, The first thing to do is go to Google and search for your brand. This step is useful for a few key reasons. Firstly, this is what your customers see when they search your brand online. Note which social profile show up as well as any other sites of interest. If you have a generic company name you may find their social profiles showing up instead of yours.
Step 3
Open up all your companies social profiles in your browser. Get the easy work out of the way and fill in:
- Profile name
- URL
- Owner (which department)
- Point of contact (the person responsible)
- Followers
- Last activity
- Frequency of posts
These columns should be filled in pretty quickly and won’t take too much effort.
Step 4
Now, the next step is slightly subjective but there is no way around that.
You need to define the purpose and tone of each of the social profiles.
What do you want to achieve from them?
Only by doing this, can you set yourself targets and measure success.
If you are struggling for inspiration, a good method is to pick the top 10 influences in your industry. Study their profiles and note down what they share, when they share, how they share and what posts receive the most engagement. Once you know this you can put your own spin on it and make it applicable to your company.
Step 5
The final stage is to check everything is ‘on brand’. Here, you are looking for colours, logos, images etc. Do they match your brand? Do they convey the right perception of your brand to your customers and potential customers?
Is there a theme running through the social profiles that these are ultimately owned by you?
Step 6
By repeating your social media audit every couple of months, you will find that any errors or mistakes that naturally happen over time are corrected quickly and painlessly. It is a good idea to keep track of all the data you record and note down anything important in the notes section.
Adam Vowles
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