It’s estimated that over three million people across the world hit social media platforms every month. This is why businesses focus on tapping into such a massive audience base to sell their products and services.
Thus, being a business owner, you need a well-defined social media strategy to ensure your business is on top of your audience's mind. However, it’s not easy to create a profitable social media marketing strategy that makes a mark in such a competitive social landscape where trends are constantly changing.
To create a perfect social media strategy, you must start auditing from scratch. The audit includes analyzing your current social media channels to find the bottlenecks and make changes that drive better results.
What is a Social Media Audit?
To escalate your online presence online, it’s important to optimize your brand’s social media profiles. The process is called a social media audit. Brands should constantly be doing this to accomplish their engagement goals.
The audit helps brands to find and fix the issues prevailing in their social media profiles. A successful social media audit helps brands curate a powerful social media strategy that can engage their audience and move their business forward.
A standard social media audit covers the following:
Performance Metrics
It answers key questions about your social media profiles and their interaction with key performance indicators such as conversions, engagement, followers, and clicks.
Social Listening
Monitoring social listening across social media platforms helps to track online conversations around your brand. It eventually boosts customer engagement and prevents your brand from fake news.
Content pillars
Content pillars are necessary to give your brand the voice it deserves. Brands create niches specific to create connections with their target audience.
Why is a Social Media Audit required?
It’s a fact that conducting social media audits takes time and resources. Yet the insights it produces are very essential and provide a detailed performance overview of your existing social media strategies and recommend new initiatives to improve engagement and conversions.
There are business benefits a comprehensive social media audit offers to your brand:
- It helps you to get instant updates about what is being said about your brand online.
- A detailed social media audit gives you an insight into your current social media performance.
- With an audit in place, you will be able to make informative decisions and scale up your social media strategy.
Steps to Conduct a Social Media Strategy
There are many ways to conduct a social media audit to understand your needs and plan an improved strategy further. Now that you know the importance of conducting a social media audit let’s look at how to do it.
Analyse Your Current Strategy
Any social media audit starts with analyzing your current or ongoing social media strategy. Create a list of all your running social media accounts on different social media channels.
Go through each account to find out the bottlenecks and other shortcomings that are preventing your brand from performing. List out the problems and start working to fix them without any further delay. Make sure that at least the basics of social media such as logo, profile name, avatar, and signature are optimized.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
Competitive analysis plays a significant role in your social media strategy since it helps you zero in on your competitor’s strengths and identifies your brand’s weaknesses on social media platforms.
To start with the competitor analysis, create a list of your competitor's keywords, their rankings, and search volume. Analyze the search terms that are ranking higher above you in search engine result pages.
Devote time to understanding their strategies, content pillars, and social media profiles at large. By observing their social media profiles you can find out the content they are sharing. It will give you an idea about the kind of content they are sharing with their audience.
A deep study of the competitor can tell you more about the platforms they use, the frequency of their posts, and the engagement received.
Find the right social media channel
An important element of your social media strategy would be the selection of social media channels. This should be based on the service niche and your target audience. For instance, if you’re targeting corporate professionals or business executives, it would be better to target platforms like LinkedIn instead of Facebook and Instagram.
You can also find the right platform by understanding the audience's interaction with said platforms. Depending on how your audience is interacting with your content, you can choose a few primary channels to escalate the pace of your social media efforts.
This is important as most customers make buying decisions after getting buyer reviews, suggestions, and recommendations via social media channels.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.