Social media provides firms with a vast platform to reach out and engage with countless customers and customers to be, influencing sales, reputation and loyalty if utilised correctly. A recent blog post featured on Entrepreneur.com discusses five significant impacts a successful social media campaign can have on a business, which can be found here.

Additionally, numerous pieces of academic research also highlight the benefits of effectively utilising social media as a digital marketing tool. The reasoning behind this is simple: customer-brand relationships influence the way a customer thinks and behaves (Aggarwal 2004).

Every interaction that takes place between a firm and an individual, even those that are not reciprocated, shapes the way that consumers view that brand, in turn affecting a brand’s equity (Keller 2001). Auditing a social media presence involves assessing where you stand on your social media channels, figuring out the purpose of each channel and whether it is performing as expected. However, before you audit your social media presence, make sure you are already implementing strategies that have been shown to be successful. For example, did you know that customers familiar with a brand place more trust in the brand when informal language styles are used to communicate on social media? (Gretry et al 2017).

My brand is already active on social media, so why do I need to audit my social media presence?

Just because you are present on social media, does not necessarily mean you have a successful social media presence. An interesting post on this can be found here.

“Presence is how you are, within where you are”

It is all too common for firms to devise social media strategies, only to find that their strategy is yesterday’s news and a new trend has taken over. Think Vine for example, who within four years saw their video sharing platform reach a peak of 200 million users before becoming obsolete in 2016 (Rowell 2016). Auditing a brands social media presence can be the difference between being a method of generating brand awareness, versus being a key driver of business growth.

It is easy to see how important my social media presence is for my business, but how can I audit this?

Image credit: CIT Support

Various approaches can be used to audit your brands social media presence. If you’re a company who is spending money on your social media presence, then you may wish to use analytics tools to measure the volume and quality of traffic directed to your site via social media channels. Google Analytics is one such tool, that is free to use. Google Analytics allows you to identify not only how many consumers have been directed to your site through social media, but also which social media channel these visitors were directed to your site by. Google Analytics also allows you to measure the success of individual social media posts, as well as being able to see the influence social media has on purchases made by the consumer.

Here we can see the breakdown of channels that directed the visitor to the site. Credit: Social Media Examiner

Facebook offers a similar tool, known as Facebook Insights. It is also a free tool which gives an overview of your performance. This tool allows a company to produce relevant posts that are positively perceived by the audience.

Facebook Insight measures the following:

• Likes
• Reactions
• Shares
• Clicks
• Comments
• Demographic reach

Analytics tools sound useful, but what if I am more concerned with why something happened, rather than just knowing that it did happen?

Like anything, analytics tools aren’t perfect. They can be great at telling you what you’re good at, but not so great at telling you why you’re good at something. Luckily for you, there are a number of tools that can be used to bridge those gaps in your understanding of customer behaviour. One of which has been outlined below.

Ask questions!

Asking your customers questions is a great way of asking why your users are doing or not doing something. One service that can provide opportunities to ask those who are engaged with your brand on social media is Qualaroo. Qualaroo asks bespoke questions to collect qualitative feedback from users. You may integrate this service into your social media activities by providing links to surveys for customers to complete. You can even consider offering incentives such as being entered into a prize draw for their efforts- contests are a great way of engaging social media users! (Di Pietro and Pantano 2012).

Be careful not to bombard your social media followers with surveys- it is likely that this won’t be appreciated and will drive away potential customers and site visitors. Getting the balance right is essential with this one!

And finally…

It is hoped that this blog has provided you with the basics you need to get started with auditing your social media presence. However, if you’re still stuck for ideas, please see this short video that might be of use.

References

Aggarwal, P. (2004). The Effects of Brand Relationship Norms on Consumer Attitudes and Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), pp.87-101.

Di Pietro, L. and Pantano, E. (2012). An empirical investigation of social network influence on consumer purchasing decision: The case of Facebook. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 14(1), pp.18-29.

Gretry, A., Horváth, C., Belei, N. and van Riel, A. (2017). “Don’t pretend to be my friend!” When an informal brand communication style backfires on social media. Journal of Business Research, [online] 74, pp.77-89. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296317300255 [Accessed 29 Nov. 2017].