If you’re like me, you’re thinking about your plans for this year and all the new and exciting challenges you want to overcome. However, before you leap forward, it’s best to examine last year’s goals, evaluate your performance, and look for any missed opportunities.
Why conduct an audit?
Tracking ROI is a perpetual challenge for social media professionals. Auditing is the most effective way to gauge your brand’s social performance over the past year and plan how to improve it in the coming one.
By laying out all the data, an audit provides a unique opportunity to see where you stand. You get a broader picture of how well your social strategy ties into your overall business goals, and the extent to which it reinforces a positive brand experience.
An audit also helps with the all-important challenge of social media collaboration across teams and markets.
Primary Areas of Concentration
In order to maximise the benefits of conducting your social media audit, you need to have an in-depth discussion around four primary areas of focus.
- Content performance review
- Workflow health check
- Social media inventory
- Digital buzz evaluation.
Assemble the team
Once you’ve crunched the numbers and drawn out the relevant insights, you need to gather all the right people in a room – executives, directors, managers, and specialists. Plan the meeting well in advance and ensure everyone is briefed on the data you’ve already assembled, what the goals of the meeting are, and what they should prepare in advance. You want to be able to have your discussions around actual data, not guesses or gut feelings.
Conversation starters
Kick things off by having your team answer these more open-ended questions about your social media performance. They should help reveal the year’s broad positives and negatives, and set the stage for a deeper conversation around those experiences.
- How are we performing?
- Is our content doing as well as it could be?
- Are we in line with the goals of our strategy?
- Is our team working collaboratively and effectively?
- Are we able to meet the needs of the requests coming in from social?
- Are we equally strong on all of our channels?
- How is our brand being talked about?
- What are our competitors doing, and how well are they doing it?
- Are our channels meeting our KPIs?
As the conversation unfolds, make sure your team decides what you know is working and plan to continue doing, as well as what isn’t going as planned and requires a different approach. Don’t leave the room until everyone has clarity about those two things and what they need to do to make them a reality in the coming year.
Maximise your findings
When completing a social media audit, comprehensive documentation and ample time are key. Don’t underestimate the time or resources that you’ll need. After putting in your due diligence and with the results of your analysis in-hand, you’ll want to do three things:
- Create clear, easily-sharable reports that detail the most important findings.
- Present your analysis to your team.
- Come up with a plan for the year together.
Final thought:
Don’t forget to share your findings with other departments within the company, look for connections, and brainstorm new ideas together.