What does auditing a social media presence mean?
Auditing, simply put, can be defined as a systematic review or assessment of something (Oxford Dictionary, 2017). However, if you’re looking for a more fancy definition of auditing, then it can be defined as a systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining audit evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled (Domingues, Sampaio & Arezes, 2011).
A social media presence means how frequent a user posts and engages on all of their social media accounts. Nowadays most businesses will definitely have a Facebook account and are more than likely to have an Instagram account too. As well as this, a Twitter account is always useful to communicate with potential and previous customers.
Putting the two together, auditing a social media presence essentially means to review how often a business is posting and engaging on their sites and the content they are posting.
More information about what a social media audit is with examples how to do it can be found here: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-conduct-social-media-audit/
Why would you carry out a social media audit?
Carrying out an audit on your social media presence is a really good way of seeing what is working, what is failing and what needs improving. It can also help you see if you need all the social media profiles you have or if you need to introduce more into your business. Ultimately, you want to find out if your social media efforts are relevant to your current objectives and goals (Gotter, 2017).
Who could you expect to do a social media audit?
A social media audit can be helpful to anyone and everyone if they have their own social media accounts. However, it would be less useful for just an average social media user who just has an account to keep in contact with people and up to date with the world. The people it would be more useful to are:
- Bloggers/vloggers
- Singers
- Actors/actresses
- Performers
- Businesses
An amusing info-graphic about the different types of social media personalities can be found here: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/social-network-users-infographic/
When should an audit take place?
An audit should happen regularly as things can change very quickly and without it being very noticeable. It is particularly important to carry an audit out early so that any potential issues are detected early before they become a serious problem. A regular social media audit will also help you to keep up to date with trends on social media.
How Do You Do a social media Audit
One effective way to do a social media audit is by using the six key digital media channels created by Dave Chaffey (2012). The six digital media channels can be seen in the image below:
I am going to focus on one of the channels in particular – social media marketing. Social media marketing means that a company participates and advertises within social networks and communities to reach and engage their audience (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2015).
There are four main aspects to social media marketing:
- Audience participation
- Managing social presence
- Viral campaigns
- Customer feedback
These main aspects can all be reviewed or assessed when it comes to doing an audit. Dominique Jackson (2017) has given some helpful steps that can be used when carrying out a social media audit:
- Make a note of all of your existing social media profiles you have and decide which are relevant enough to focus your audit on
- Analyse each social media profile to see which profile is performing the best, this is where you will find out what works and doesn’t
- Identify top performing social media posts, is there a correlation between the top posts and the bottom posts?
- Identify your sites most shared content to help see the type of content your audience shares and visits the most
- Check that your branding is immediately recognisable across all of your social media profiles
- Define your audience as this might’ve changed from when you first created your social media sites
- Explore new social media platforms that you do not have but could have
- Create new objectives
The short video below gives ten ‘laws’ of social media marketing that businesses should be following if they use social media. It breaks down what consumers expect from a business when visiting their social media and also sets a potential criteria for businesses to use when auditing their social media presence.
(Source: Entrepreneur, 2016)
References
Oxford Dictionaries | English. (2017). audit | Definition of audit in English by Oxford Dictionaries. [online] Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/audit [Accessed 29 Nov. 2017].
Domingues, J.P.T., Sampaio, P. & Arezes, P.M. (2011) Beyond ‘Audit’ Definition: A Framework Proposal For Integrated Management Systems. Proceeding of the 2011 Industrial Engineering Research Conference. p1
Gotter, A. (2017) How to Conduct a Social Media Audit. [Online] Socialmediaexaminar.com. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-conduct-social-media-audit/ [Accessed 29th Nov. 2017].
Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2015). Digital Marketing. Pearson Education Limited. Retrieved 29 Nov. 2017, from <http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=936826>
Jackson, D. (2017) How to Perform a Social Media Audit. [Online] Sproutsocial.com. Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-audit/ [Accessed 29th Nov. 2017]
