Stephanie Donelson

Spring cleaning shouldn’t just apply to our homes or workspaces — it can also apply to our marketing efforts.

Spring is the ideal time for a refresh and reset and one perfect marketing tactic to start with is social media.

Today, I’ll be diving deep into how to spring clean your social media marketing with a social media audit. The social media audit gives you a great overview of how your accounts are doing, what content is working well or isn’t, and how you can improve your social media marketing.

Ready? Let’s spring ahead!

The social media audit

While many social media managers can easily summarize what content works well on their accounts it’s still imperative to track social media performance. Many social media managers use the reports built into their social media management tools, but I like to go the extra mile and create my own spreadsheet to track key metrics month-by-month.

What to include in your key metrics audit:

• Impressions
• Daily average reach
• Total engagements (if you’re really ambitious, break it down even further by reactions, comments, and shares)
• Engagement rate
• Clicks
• Web traffic (from Google Analytics)
• Total followers
• Follower growth
• Total posts

You should at least do a year-over-year comparison, but like I said above, I also like tracking these specific metrics each month to get a more granular view of what’s going on with my accounts.

By tracking these different metrics, you can understand if the content you shared that month was captivating by tracking impressions, engagements, clicks, and follower growth or you can see if your content didn’t hit the mark. You can also get a better understanding of the right frequency you should be posting by tracking total posts per month and seeing if your metrics go up when you post more or if they flatline.

Remember, the key to good social media is quality and not quantity. While that seems counterproductive as the lifetime of a social media post seems to be getting shorter and shorter, it’s much more important to invest in crafting well-written social media posts instead of sharing something just to have something go out that day.

The social media posts

Another important element to track in your audit is the actual content itself. I often recommend adding tracking metrics to your social media editorial calendar so you can quickly see what the content was and how it did.

When it comes to tracking content, you should look at the:

• Content source: Is it your original content or curated?
• Content format: Was the social media post a link, text post, poll, video, or image?
• Content type: Were you linking to a blog post, eBook, podcast, video, case study, etc.?

What you can learn from your social media audit

Your social media audit can be a living, breathing document that gets updated regularly. I typically run results monthly, quarterly, and yearly along with daily check-ins for reactions or comments I need to respond to. But, there are some big ideas you should be pulling from your results.

Some key takeaways you should be looking for after building your social media audit include:

• Goals: Is it time to update your social media goals or KPIs? Perhaps you’ve set a big goal to grow your following by a certain percentage but your current metrics just aren’t adding up. That’s okay, maybe it’s time to refine that goal and shift toward better engagement instead of having a large but unresponsive following.
• Channels: Are some channels just not performing the way they used to? It might be time to step away from them or close those accounts. Not all social media networks are created equal and you need to be where it makes the most sense to reach your target demographic. Perhaps your brand is more in the B2B space and you’ve seen Facebook metrics drop. It’s okay to shift away from Facebook and focus on channels like LinkedIn or Twitter.
• Followers: Your social media audit can also provide great insight on your followers’ demographic data and ensure your buyer personas are still relevant and you’re creating the right kind of content for your followers.
• Content: Finally, your audit can tell you what kind of content your following enjoys consuming and what they wouldn’t mind seeing less of. Pass this info onto your content marketing team so they can repurpose high-performing content or add additional related resources to your library to delight your followers.

Tips for tracking performance for your next social media audit

Depending on your social media scheduling tool there are some ways you can set up additional tracking and tagging to make measuring your social media’s performance even easier next time you run an audit.

• Add post tags: Some social media tools allow you add tags or campaigns to each social media post so you can quickly organize your posts to get a better understanding of what content types or topics do well or don’t.
• Track hashtags: Make sure you’re tracking what posts have hashtags and what the hashtags are. Are they getting more engagement than other posts? Are your hashtags still relevant? Can you ask others sharing your content to use specific hashtags?
• Use UTMs: Add UTM parameters to your links to add an additional layer of tracking. While most channels are good at telling you clicks sometimes the numbers don’t match up to analytics. Use UTM parameters to add your own tracking to the links you share to see what campaigns or content is sending traffic to your site – and even understand if you should start creating more content around popular pieces of content that always get lots of clicks.
• Use link shorteners: I also like to use link shorteners, like Bit.ly, to see how many clicks certain links got.

Do you have any other tips for marketers on running a social media audit? Share your ideas in the comments below!