Social network audits are useful for measuring the impact of your communication. There is no need to show that social media is changing rapidly. The rules that applied in the past have become obsolete. Many players are changing the rules of the game, from the new marketing innovation to a standard element of the media mix.

Nowadays, all marketing managers consider at least one YouTube video, a blog or a Facebook page in their marketing campaign. In all this choice, are social networks worth it? Only an audit of your social media gives you the answer. But what is a social media audit?

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit is essentially about reviewing your social media data to determine if the social media program is working and if it’s optimized for your original goals. You probably had clearly stated goals when you started on the web.

The numbers are a decoy. Often I hear I have 4,000 followers. Yes, it’s pride. This figure does not mention at all if these followers are the right targets. Or the ones we are trying to communicate with. This figure does not tell us if these “followers” are interested in the topics we are dealing with and whether they interact with us.

What does a social media audit contain?

The audit of social media will have to rely on a number of facts, then correlate them with expected results to know the impact of your program. You can also collect raw data on several different variables, such as the scope (fans / followers), the frequency (respect of publication schedules), the commitments (conversations, comments, retweets, likes), the influence (score of Klout, Twitter ratios, blog score, pagerank) and sentiment (positive, negative or neutral mentions of the brand). This information also informs about the attractiveness and the interest of your brand e

For example, suppose you have a large number of followers on Twitter, but only broadcast, whether you talk about your business, rarely or never talk to anyone, and never be retweeted. It is safe to say that people are listening to you. If your goal was to tick the social media box in your performance appraisal, that’s fine, you’re done, but if you’re going to do something useful, that’s not it.

When I do a social media audit, it starts with the question of what you were trying to do.

Social media audit focused on the original purpose

Without knowing where you intend to go, it’s hard to know if you’re on the road. Let’s say your goal was to increase the positive mentions of a big project. The same word increase means that you need a basic measurement – how many positive mentions we had before working our magic, and how many positive mentions after we worked our magic. Has it increased? If so, well, if not, why not? Good research is an essential companion to good communication, including social media. An art associated with a science is a powerful combination.

I recommend a star publishing system to my clients, where your website / blog is the center of your media empire. As a result, web analytics, usually Google Analytics, is a critical data source for a social media audit.

Google Analytics can show you sources such as traffic sources, entry and exit points, time spent on the site, bounce rate, and more. It’s very useful to know if people generally access your site from Twitter and then run away within 30 seconds.

All of this information provides clues to the success or failure of your content marketing. And content marketing is at the heart of social media.

Other tools, such as Website Grader, Twitter Grader, Twitalyzer, Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights, etc. provide a wealth of data points to evaluate your efforts in social media.

To be useful, someone must gather and assimilate all these data and draw conclusions. It’s hard work, but it’s more effective than chasing fans and fans who have no interest in your brand and it allows you to effectively measure the impact of your communication.

Download a template of the social media audit report