How to review your Social Media and set yourself up for Success

Introduction

 

It’s no secret that social media is now an essential part of your marketing mix. Whether you are a solopreneur, a large corporation, a professional service provider or a retailer, you need to make sure that the time you spend on social media is effective and helps you get what you want and need out of it. 

But it is so easy to let your strategy and plan fall through the wayside; you get busy, you need to focus on your clients or life just happens.

By conducting a regular social media audit, you will be able to:

• Understand which platforms and formats are working for your business. 
• Identify whether your content is resonating with your audience and driving sales. 
• Focus your time and efforts on what’s working and ditch what isn’t.  

After all in the words of George Bernard Shaw: ‘Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change…cannot change anything.’

The great news is that reviewing monthly or even quarterly won’t take up a lot of time and, you will reap the rewards as you will know exactly where to focus your efforts. Remember to benchmark against yourself and your own progress as long as things are improving; then it’s all good. 

Now I will take you through step by step process of how to conduct your audit:

 

Step One: Reviewing your profiles

 

Let’s be honest how often do we review our pages and profiles? If you haven’t conducted a review for a while (or ever!), you will need to start with this:

Check:

• Are your accounts and pages fully optimised and all images and logos the right size and picture quality.
• Are your contact details all up to date?
• Are you making the most of any new features available
• Do all the links work correctly?
• Does your headline clearly explain how you help your customers?

If you haven’t looked at this in a while, there may be some work to do here, but the most important thing is that you have a consistent presence on the platforms you are active on and that the branding, fonts and writing styles is consistent with your website. 

Also, make sure that if you have any dormant accounts that the branding is still consistent and up to date!! If you don’t want to close them in case you want to reuse them you can make the accounts private in case you want to resurrect them further down the line.

 

Step Two: Identify your audience

 

It is essential to note the key metrics for each of your social media profiles and page. I would recommend doing this for all platforms, not just the ones you are currently active on, as it is helpful to understand the demographics of your overall audience.

Followers/ following: 

Make a note of the number of followers you have and the number of people that follow you. It’s probably not possible for you to assess whether all of them are relevant to your business. But overall, they should be a good mix of people who influence your audience and provide complementary services to yours. As well as Customers, current and potential clients, inspiring content and things that you like (we all need a bit of fun after all!)

Audience Demographics:

 All platforms contain key audience insight’s on our audiences demographics. And this is split by location, age, demographics and gender. Make a note of this data – if it matches your target audience, then great you are on the right track. If you are using a Linkedin business page, you will also be able to see the job function, employer size, location and level of seniority for each of your followers. 

Website Traffic:

Use google analytics or your website analytics to see where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing when they get there. You may be getting a lot of likes on Instagram, for instance, but if Linkedin is driving more traffic and sales to your website, you may need to shift your goals and focus to account for this. 

 

Step Three: Dive into the platform insights. 

 

By now you should have begun to get a picture of which platforms your audience favours interacting with you on. Now it’s time to review your overall data and see what’s really happening behind the scenes.

The insights do vary from platform to platform but broadly speaking, you will be able to see and monitor the following.

• Profile/ Page views: The number of people who visited your profile or page.
• Website Clicks: The number of people who clicked through to your website.
• Reach: The number of individual’s who saw your post.
• Impressions/ Post views: The number of times your post was seen. 
• Likes: The number of people who liked or reacted to your post with an emoji.
• Comments: The number of comments on your post.
• Shares: The number of shares your post got.
• Saves: The number of people who shared your post.
• Engagement Percentage: The number of engagements your post got divided by its reach x 100.

Remember to note the figures and percentages so you can continue to track your improvement over time.

Step four: Does your progress match your goals?

 

All businesses have different reasons for using social media, and that may also vary from platform to platform. For example, a well-established tech company may use Linkedin for recruitment and to find new clients. But may use Twitter as a customer service tool to instantly answer any tech queries. 

In contrast, if your business is new, you will probably be using the platforms to increase brand awareness and grow your overall audience.

Some common goals are:

• Increasing Brand Awareness.
• Increased community engagement.
• Driving traffic to your website.
• Increased Audience growth.
• Generating more leads and Sales.

What you have learnt so far and your overall business objectives should help to inform your goals. 

Step five: Look at the individual post content.

 

With your goals and your performance on each platform in mind, you need to start thinking about your best and worst-performing posts and whether they meet your goals. Looking at the good and the bad will help you get a realistic picture and focus on what is actually working. 

I would recommend using a month of usual active as a benchmark, but if your social media presence is sporadic, you may need to look at the last quarter to get a true picture of your activity.

I would recommend looking at the top and bottom three posts. The top 3 will be those with a high level of reach and engagement, and the bottom 3-5 will show the opposite. It is possible but unusual these days to get a good reach with minimal engagement as the engagement stats teach the algorithm which posts will do well.

Think about why the posts performed well or poorly. Can you see a pattern?

• Did you @mention anyone
• What type of content was it?
• Was it widely shared, commented on or liked?
• What time did you post it at?
• Did it have a strong call to action?
• Were the visuals/ video quality good?
• Did you use the correct hashtags?

Now you have conducted your social media audit, you should have a good understanding of what works well for your business and what doesn’t. Make sure you use these learnings to focus on the platform, content and goals that will drive your business forward. 

If you think you need a social media audit and want to get a full overview of the metrics that matter and get 3-5 key takeaways to turbocharge your accounts. Then just click here to start the conversation