Why You Need a Social Media Audit

It’s hard out there for a social media manager. You want to be present on as many social platforms as possible, but you don’t have time to create content for all of them. You don’t have all the assets you need. And colleagues are always pointing to great competitor content and saying, “why aren’t we doing that?”

The solution to these challenges starts with a clear social strategy—and that starts with a social audit.

A social audit is an assessment that benchmarks what you’re doing now, how well it’s performing, and how it stacks up to your competition. It answers key questions like:

On which platforms are your audiences most active?
Are you talking to the right audience on each platform?
Which platforms are getting the most engagement? Driving the most traffic to your site? Requiring the most community management?
Are all your social accounts fully optimized?
Which of your competitors is killing it on Pinterest? On Instagram? On LinkedIn? What can you learn from them?

In other words, the audit helps to ensure you’re in the right places to meet your key audiences and identifies which of those platforms you should allocate the most resources to.

Aligning tactics to a strategy

But an audit is more than a set of findings. If you’ve got a good digital partner doing your audit, you’ll also get a recommended strategy that ensures each platform is leveraged for its unique strengths and fits user mindsets. For example, while Instagram and Pinterest are both spaces people turn to for inspiration and ideas, the user experience of Instagram is one of passively browsing until inspiration strikes, while on Pinterest it’s more about hunting for ideas around a specific topic and saving them for later reference.

Your social audit will look at your content and tactics and help you align your strategy to user expectations and behaviors for better engagement—and a more focused content development workflow.

Plus, you’ll have a way to document how all the platforms work together to tell your brand stories consistently, even though some stories might have more focus in the platforms that are better designed for that kind of storytelling.

A good audit will also provide tips on any potential gaps identified, such as:

Niche social networks you’re not on but that might be big for your industry
Properly tracking social referrals in Google Analytics
Developing content with repurposing in mind
Formalizing the social workflow and using editorial calendars

Most brands should be active on social media, but the details of an effective social strategy are different for everyone because your audiences and brand stories are unique. If you’re not sure you’re on the right platforms, creating the right content, or measuring the right engagement, start with a social audit to get you quickly on the road to social success.