Social Media Audit

Social media is rising in popularity for all types of brands. Brands utilize multiple channels—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.—and need to maintain cross-platform consistency. Periodically, brands need to conduct quick audits to make sure their digital presence is secure, up-to-date, and coherent.

At GROWL, we conduct various quick social media audits for our clients, both holistically and individually, for each channel. This helps us get an understanding of their current brand personality and digital presence.

Learn a little more about our audits & quick-and-easy steps to complete them!

What is a social media audit?

Like other audits, this social media audit reviews and contextualizes data from various platforms. These come in handy when planning campaigns, rebranding, or reevaluating marketing plans. Audits can give you an idea of a brand’s current social media (think: you’ve just started as the Social Media Director and need to find out how the brand stands), help determine paths and evaluate per strategy and determine what is working (or not).

Audit your socials in 3 steps

1 Start your Audit Document & Get Searching

When conducting your audit, you will be examining various accounts and noting vital information on each, so step one is determining where you’ll be storing your findings. Many social media audits use spreadsheets to intake information. Many also go WAY in-depth for multiple dimensions of the brand(s) and their numerous channels. To get started, use our free template (found at the end of this post) to complete a brief yet holistic social media audit! First time? No worries, we’ll walk you through it.

After you’ve determined your method of collection, find all of your accounts and start the breakdown. In some instances, it is good to complete a few searches for duplicate & fake accounts. For the first segment of information, you’ll need to collect:

• Purpose statement per platform
• Profile name and handle for each platform (i.e., GROWL Agency, @growlagency)
• A link to this account (this makes it easier to look back! i.e., www.growlagency.com)
• Number of followers (who follows you where?! i.e., Facebook 545)
• Activity rating (are you active? How often do you post? i.e., 1/day, 2/week, 3/month)
• Access including username and password, not access (was it created with an employee’s personal email or the company’s? i.e., greg@growlagency.com vs. bark@growlagency.com)

It’s also a good idea to understand general and account-specific audience demographics, but when you’re conducting a quick, holistic audit, this isn’t necessary. If you’re entirely rebranding, new to a brand (especially one with messy social), or even starting something new, it’s good to include A LOT more information.

Want to take the basics further? Add: demographics for your brand, demographics per platform, top 3-5 metrics per platform, identify top 3-5 posts per platform, and cross-reference top post information with your platform purpose statement and demographics.
(NOTE: a lot of this additional information comes when you complete analytic reports per platform.)

2 Verify Branding

A key to successful social media marketing has consistent, cohesive, and current branding. The last thing you want is for users to be uncertain if they’re following the right you on each platform. Think about it, you want your followership matched across platforms, and this can’t be achieved if things don’t look similar and if a user questions: Is this @growl Twitter the same as @growlagency Instagram?

To verify your branding, you’ll need to look at the following:

• Are all @handles and page names the same? (i.e., GROWL Agency across all platforms vs. Growl Agency for some and GROWL for others)
• Are the color usages on brand? (This step can be skipped if you haven’t updated any brand elements!)
• Check profile and header images for:
  • Correct sizing (every platform has different dimensions, so make sure heads aren’t cut off and text is readable)
  • Logo usage
  • Similar imagery
• Compare bios and about sections to confirm you’re telling the same brand story across channels
  It is essential to have related branding across all of your social media channels to emphasize a universal story/brand and connection between pages.

3 Evaluation & Next Steps

Congratulations! You’re just about done with your social media audit! Now that you’ve curated all of the necessary information, we can look into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Evaluation and next steps can vary per your brand, channels, status, and goals, but every audit should consider. 

• Handles, names & branding—We cannot stress enough that these need to be consistent across all platforms. If your handle on Instagram is @growl_agency and on Facebook is @growlagency, there is no reason it should be just @growl on Twitter.
• Followership—Which platform has the greatest and least followership? Can you increase this by posting more frequently? Or is the account even necessary?
  • If the account isn’t serving a purpose or meeting goals, get rid of it (i.e., a kid’s shoe company might want to be on Facebook but wouldn’t gain much value from Twitter)
• Centralize all channel ownership and passwords—remember how we mentioned making sure your accounts were started on a personal email? Now it’s time to change that, so every account is linked to the primary company email! That way, if one persona leaves, the account doesn’t go with them. Do the same thing with usernames and passwords—create a shared document for all responsible parties to find login information easily.
• Determine areas of potential growth—look at all of the platforms, and of those you don’t have, consider if they would add value to your brand and digital presence. If not, don’t add them just to have them. If so, add them, brand them, and get them out there.

Start your social media audit now

Need more than just a simple audit? Contact us today and see how our team can help take your social media marketing to the next level!