Why you need to do a social media audit

You’ve read time and time again that I always stress the importance of having solid social media strategy in place.

Devising a strong plan on how your station or network will utilise platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat will drastically increase the probability of social media success.

Once you put your strategy into practice, you’ll need to monitor the plan and ensure everything is being carried out as intended. This is where a social media audit comes in handy.

What is a social media audit?

It’s a comprehensive assessment on what’s effective, what’s not working and what can be improved across all your social media channels.

Overall outline of the audit

So you’re ready to run an audit, but what exactly should you be looking at? Try looking at these three key areas:

  • Your profile pictures and bios – Are they strong, captivating and good for the platform? Are they consistent across all channels?
  • Your posts – Are you posting often enough using the right form of content?
  • How are you posting? Are you using the right formatting so that your posts look slick enough? Are you utilising tools like hashtags and location tags effectively?

Then dig a little deeper.

  • What do you want to achieve from your social media? And have you set goals accordingly?
  • Are you tracking with some sort of lead capture data?
  • Do you have something in place to measure the success of your advertising ROI and gauge the amount of website traffic you are receiving?
  • What are the different types of content you are creating that will improve your social media strategy? Where and what can you tweak?
  • What are other networks, stations and shows doing on social media accounts? What seems to be working for them?

Revise specific platforms

Run through this little checklist so you can make some notes and make a detail assessment:

Instagram

  • Is your profile picture the right size? Does your bio need a refresh?
  • Run an audit of your content – what’s working, what style of captions are most effective (open ended questions, call to action etc.), are you using the right hashtags and are you posting at optimal times/frequently enough?
  • Do a clean-up of your followers – detect bots/fake accounts, identify and reach out to influencers

Facebook

  • Do your profile picture and cover photo fit your brand, and are a nice clean design? How do they look on mobile?
  • Have you included your website link in your ‘About’ section?
  • Are you posting engaging content at least once a day?
  • Do you have unanswered messages, post comments or spam inboxes?
  • Are you posting a wide range of content which includes videos, images, links and network promo?

Twitter

  • Is your website link listed on your profile? Does your bio need a refresh?
  • Are you pushing out at least five tweets – including replying back to others and retweets – per day?
  • Is the content engaging?
  • Are you tailing your Tweets with relevant #hashtags?
  • Are you engaging in conversations with others?
  • Have you created Twitter Lists?

Right, so you’ve done a sweep of your accounts, now it’s time to check out the competition.

Research your competitors

Select three of your rival shows, stations or networks and take a look at their accounts.

Then, have look at other brands within the radio industry and see what they are doing effectively in their social media marketing? What are they doing that you aren’t?

Note all your ideas down.

Review your entire strategy

The audit should also include how effectively you are using each component of your social media network.

  • Are you utilising each platform to its maximum potential?
  • Are you posting a wide range of content?
  • Are there missed opportunities to use particular tools more often? Eg. Include more Facebook Live steams or push out frequent Instagram Stories? Note them down.

It’s imperative that you evaluate what your best performing posts were on each platform. You should also identify which activations, posts or promotions delivered the best results – by measuring these metrics you’ll be able to find out what works best, then replicate that again and develop more effective targeted campaigns.

Set some new goals for 2018

  • If you set any goals – did you achieve them? If not, why?
  • Was there a particular campaign or platform that did not perform well? Did it send traffic to your website regardless?

Once you’ve noted down the answer, you can set some new goals for 2018. It could something as simple as increasing engagement on Facebook videos or upping your Instagram followers.

Keep in mind that you need to follow metrics that are relevant to your brand and the industry. Hopefully you kick off 2018 with a ton of inspirations and #goals!


To submit your content to Radio Today’s Social Scorecard, send us an inbox message via our Facebook page.

Social Scorecard is compiled exclusively for Radio Today by Jess Frangelli and is brought to you by Social News Desk.

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