When you start working with the social networks of a new brand, it is not simply to have access to the accounts and go straight to publish. Taking the reins of social networks to lead them with meaning and with a strategy behind it, entails prior work in the form of an audit of social networks.
In this post, we explain how to carry out the first steps of this audit.
When can you do a social media audit?
The first thing you should know is that a social media audit can really be done at any time. We recommend doing it when we start working with a new brand, to know what state it is in and what is the progress of the objectives set.
If you think that your social networks need a turn or a facelift because they are not getting what you are looking for, it is time to carry out the audit. Follow the steps in this article and you will be able to see its current state and how you can improve it. And if you don't have time or feel lost, our social media team will be happy to help you.
Identifying the starting point
It may seem like a tedious and unnecessary task, but with this brand analysis you will be able to:
Detect improvement points.
Identify the channels that are best meeting the objectives set.
Find new ideas and content strategies.
Get to know the target audience and the brand's competitors better.
Improve or rethink the strategy used to date.
1. Where to start?
The ideal is to start from a previous briefing provided by the brand detailing the following:
Channels
Objectives
Post Frequency
Success stories and errors
Results in figures
It is important that the brand provides this information before continuing with the audit of social networks: it is they who must be clear about these points, especially the objectives and the results in figures.
Numerical results are a way to quantify the success of a post or piece of content, so having solid data to go from is a must.
Where do we get the data from?
You can take advantage of tools such as:
Social media statistics: Instagram Insights, Creator Studio.
External tools: Metricool, Audiense, Hubspot, Hootsuite, Later.
2. Are they meeting the objectives?
With the above tools and the briefing provided by the brand, you can quickly check whether the objectives set in the past are being met or not.
What if they don't have defined goals?
In that case, it takes an overview of the state of social networks with the most relevant interaction metrics (comments, shares, saves, etc.) and the evolution of followers.
It is important that you have data from a long enough period (for example, the last year), and not just the last month, to see the trend and quickly identify the spikes in interaction and followers.
3. How to know what happened in the trend changes
The simplest and most direct option: ask the customer.
If the client does not know exactly what was done, it is time for you to do some manual work and go to the tools of the platforms (Facebook, Instagram...) or third parties (Metricool, Later...) to check what was done in particular in the post that caused this change in trend. Maybe there was a contest, a collaboration with influencers or Social Ads.
4. Quality of followers
Many times we come across accounts that have tens of thousands of followers; however, their engagement figures are very low.
This can be due to several factors:
The content you are creating does not engage the followers enough to interact. Consider whether the posts offer valuable content or are simply commercial posts where you try to sell the product or service.
The high volume of followers is due to past contests and therefore they do not end up being the objective target of the brand. They started following the account at a specific time to get the prize you were offering, but not because they were really interested in what was published.
Followers are bots.
How to know if the followers are of quality?
There are two ways of knowing:
The manual way: select several followers at random and check their profiles. Are they active on the platform? Do they have a profile picture? Do they follow many more people than they follow him or her? Your other option is to check with tools like Socialblade or hype auditor.
Once you have these 4 points analyzed and completed, you will have a detailed view of the state of the brand's social networks. From here, we can assess new strategies to achieve the objectives. If you are interested in a proposal please let us know! We would be happy to help!
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