Social media has become an influential force in brand recognition, audience engagement, and creating meaningful connections. To leverage these platforms to their full potential, organizations must adapt and improve their social strategies. A thorough social media audit, amplified by Meltwater’s innovative data intelligence, allows us to comprehensively evaluate your current social media activities, measure their impact, adapt strategies to align with organisational goals, and optimise future performance.

The concept of an “audit” transcends the sphere of finance and accounting, applying to any sector driven by strategic planning and dedicated investments. It becomes vital to perform regular check-ups on the health of your social media footprint and the returns it’s generating for your business.

Unravelling the deck of social media audits – an array of benefits

A thorough social media audit offers you a panoramic view of your social media performance based on several key performance indicators (KPIs) such as reach, engagement, event performance, and audience growth.

Enriched by insights from Meltwater’s social analytics and social listening, we delve into the following key factors:

• Identification of your most effective platforms.
• Exploration of content preferences of your audience and their engagement patterns.
• Understanding of your audience demographics and growth triggers.
• Analysis of each platform’s contribution to your goals and objectives.
• Evaluation of your participation in social media conversations.
• Performance analysis of campaign or event-based social media content.

These insights pave the way for strategic recommendations on community engagement and content planning and form the foundation of a refined social media strategy. We’re proud to share a recent case study of our work with the Crop Trust, a vivid example of outcomes from our in-depth social media audits.

Key elements of a social media audit

1. Establish goals and objectives: Collaborative discussions to define your expectations for the audit, ensuring access to all relevant data and establishing measurable objectives that guide the audit towards actionable outputs.
2. Define key performance indicators: Agreement on a set of KPIs that accurately track the success of your social media accounts, facilitated by Meltwater’s intuitive analytics.
3. Situational analyses: Assessment of your social media accounts to identify high-performing and under-performing accounts, facilitated by Meltwater’s comprehensive analytics.
4. Monitor key performance indicators: Collection and analysis of data from each platform within the agreed timeframe, supported by Meltwater’s robust data intelligence.
5. Identify patterns: Analysis of KPIs to discern trends and anomalies in the data.
6. Expand analyses: Deeper exploration of audience demographics, top hashtags, top posts, competitor standing, and content analysis powered by Meltwater’s analytics.

Watch out for missteps

In conducting social media audits, beware of frequent missteps such as overlooking data privacy, defining unclear objectives, choosing inappropriate KPIs, ignoring competitor analysis, neglecting paid advertising performance, failing to adapt strategy based on audience feedback, comparing metrics without context, using non-optimal timeframes for campaigns, or mismanaging expectations regarding target demographics.

Read on in our next blog post where we’ll take you through an in-depth analysis of social media data, reveal key areas for growth and improvement, formulate practical recommendations, and prepare a revised social media strategy to turbocharge your brand’s online presence.