Social media marketing is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. However, many businesses build social media campaigns without accounting for their social media performance. They look at the raw data like likes, shares, and comments for their posts. This data is important but only a small part of the picture. The best way for evaluating social media performance properly is to start with a social media audit.
What is a Social Media Audit?
The whole point of running an audit is evaluating social media performance in order to have a big picture of of your social media presence. This will involve you going through your social media analytics tools, content, and social media profiles to record your data. By seeing things from a bird’s eye perspective, you can make impactful changes, create a better strategy, improve systems, and consequently see better social media performance.
Start with an Excel Spreadsheet
When evaluating social media performance you want to start with a general overview of your social media efficacy. To do this, simply create an excel spreadsheet with your profile pages in the rows and the other information (listed below) in the columns.
- Profile page (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
- Target demographic and other audience data
- Engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments)
- Monthly audience growth
- Referral traffic sources
Focus on Finding Winning Content
This is just the beginning as evaluating social media performance requires you to look at your posts. What you want to do is to go through each of your social media profiles and look through all of your posts. Focus on collecting data for the following:
- List of posts based on highest engagement metrics (focus on most popular ones)
- Subject matter of content (ex: low carb, gluten free, paleo, etc.)
- Audience segment that the post is targeting
- Type of content (link to articles, surveys, contests, videos, photos, etc.)
- Type of engagement compared to audience size
- Top referrers to your post to identify partnership opportunities
The purpose of looking through all your posts is to figure out a content strategy for your social media marketing. You want to look at the most popular posts and evaluate them. For example, you should see what subject topics to create more content on, what audience segments you should cater more to, the types of content you should be creating more of, etc.
It’s also important to point out the fact that your engagement metrics should be based on your follower count at the moment your post was made. A post that gets 300 likes with a follower count of 2,000 isn’t the same as a post that gets 3,000 likes with a follower count of 20,000. Finally, you’ll want to look at your top referrers to see if you can possibly develop a relationship with them and help each other’s social media accounts grow.
Focus on Each Platform’s Analytics
The next thing you want to do when evaluating social media performance is to focus on your posting strategy. You want to get an idea of how often to post, what days to post, and what times to post. You also want to get advanced demographic information to better serve your followers. In order to do this, you need to take a deep dive into each platform’s analytics.
You’ll notice that social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will have their own analytics tools to help you improve your social media marketing. If you’re subscribed to a third party social media analytics software, you can use them as well. These analytics tools will give you data on what days of the week are receiving the most engagement, what times you should be posting, and when it’s not worth posting.
Demographic information is available too. You’ll see the breakdown of your followers by their country, city, sex, and age. This information can be used to improve your messaging and consequently increase your engagement metrics. Some tools also give you the impression count and the engagement metrics. This is one of the strongest indicators that tell you what kind of content to post as you’re getting a direct conversion ratio to work with.
Calculate Your Social Media ROI
While most of the conversation to this point has been about engagement, ROI is probably the most important aspect of evaluating social media performance. After all, there’s no point getting involved with social media if it’s not adding to your bottom line. That’s why you want to measure your ROI.
First, get an idea of how much revenue your social media marketing is generating for your business. This can often be hard to do, but there are multiple ways to do it. You want to start by looking through all of your promotional posts and adding the sales figures that comes from these posts. You want to estimate the numbers on a monthly basis.
Next, you want to make sure you are tracking all sources of sales from your social media accounts. This includes direct links (which you should be tracking) that promote your product/services, your social media stores, sponsored posts you’ve sold to advertisers, and affiliate sales.
If your business depends on leads, then you want to make sure you track every activity on your social media profiles that generates leads for your business. From there, you want to multiply the average value of your leads with the number of leads generated to see how much revenue your social media activity is generating for you. You may also want to track leads from social media profiles differently to see their value in comparison to other channels and even different social media platforms.
Finally, you want to compare your revenue to how much your social media marketing is costing you. If you’re outsourcing your social media marketing, factor in these costs. If you’re advertising on these platforms to promote your posts, add them to your total monthly expenses to this figure as well. Now take your revenue and subtract the expenses to get your net profit figure for your social media activities.
The Value of a Social Media Audit
By conducting a thorough social media audit, you’ll have a strong idea of how to improve your social media marketing. You’ll figure out the best strategy to use, what kind of content to create, how to connect with your audience, and how to generate more revenue from your marketing. The idea is to run an audit every three to four months due to changing trends, changing consumer behavior, and new audiences.
Let Social Vernacular Evaluate Social Media Performance for You!
I get it! It’s hard out there for a business owner. 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 media audit.
You can use the advice above to perform your own social media audit, or… For a low-cost, no-obligation social media audit designed to give you a complete look at where your social media marketing efforts currently stand as well as a list of recommended tips, quick fixes and comprehensive go-forward strategies to help you take your social media accounts to the next level simply fill out the form below!
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