How to Conduct a Small Business Social Media Audit

For a busy small business owner, an effective social media campaign can be a powerful way to promote the business and its capabilities. On the flip side, an ineffective social media campaign can waste valuable time and effort.

Because understanding the difference can be difficult, conducting social media audits on a consistent basis is a good way to review your company’s social marketing performance and to identify potential areas of improvement.

Important Review

While the term "audit" can seem daunting at first glance, the process is simply a detailed review of your social media accounts, content and performance. Rather than continuing to post articles, videos, photos and links without attracting the attention or engagement you were hoping for, a social media audit helps you understand which content is most effective in supporting your goals and helping you generate a positive return on your time and financial investment.

You want to be able to identify whether your social networks are contributing to your overall business results, and to calculate the return on investment for any social media advertising you may be doing.

A good starting point is figuring out how many social media accounts your small business has. While the major accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are probably self-evident, it’s easy to set up an account on a secondary network and forget about it over time.

You should then examine the profile sections on your accounts to make sure all of the information is up-to-date, accurate, and matches from account to account. This should include your biography, business profile, images, destination URLs, landing pages, and other descriptive language.

You also want to be sure your profile information has the most effective keywords to increase the chances of your account being found on each social network.

Study the Statistics

After you’ve reviewed this basic information about your accounts, it’s time to look at your performance metrics to understand the content and format that is generating the most engagement among your followers.

Each social network will have an analytics page to help you gain an understanding of how well your content is resonating with your audience, as well as demographic information about the people visiting your pages. Understanding demographic data will help you understand whether your social media content is a good fit with your current and prospective customer base.

The statistics you’ll want to review include:

• Visitors, followers, and interactions
• Traffic generated to your website or landing page
• Followers gained or lost over the past month
• The numbers of likes, comments and shares the content generated
• Days and times when posts gained the most interactions

If you are running ads on a social network, you’ll gain access to more detailed performance data such as the number of impressions (the number of visitors who saw your ad), clicks or other actions, and the associated costs. This data will help you calculate whether the return on investment is worthwhile, and determine if there are steps you can take to improve your ads’ performance.

Enter your performance data into a spreadsheet, and plan to conduct another review in a months’ time. Each month’s information will be interesting by itself, but you will need a few months’ worth of data to understand the overall trends and to generate insights into how you can improve your social media marketing efforts.