How to Conduct an Audit of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you have been usingsocial media marketing to promote your business, it is important that you at least semi-regularly run an audit of your strategies. Audits help you identify what works and what doesn’t, so that you brainstorm ideas to make sure that your future campaigns perform as well as they possibly can. If you’ve never done an audit of your social media marketing strategies, we wrote this guide to help.

Create the Template of Your Report

The first thing you need to do is determine what important information you will be tracking for the report you will create after the audit. Whether you are creating a spreadsheet to track this information, or something more like a like a slideshow or text document, you should answer the following:

• What are your KPIs? (Key performance indicators, or in other words, the way you measure your success) Depending on the platform and type of campaign they could be likes, new followers, shares, clicks and leads submitted
• What type of campaign did you run? Was it simple posts, engaging influencers or customers or paid advertisements?
• What was the target audience? Make sure to list the audience size and any demographic information such as location, age, gender, and so on.

Once you’ve determined the answers to these questions, you can create a format and template to use for your report that you can re-use for future audits as well. If you as a business have no previous experience with reporting and analyzing data, we recommend seeking help from a third party that specializes in that area.

Analyze Each Social Media Platform

Once you’ve determined the structure of the report, you can start looking at the previous social media marketing strategies you ran. The first thing to do is to take a broad look at the campaigns you ran on every single social media platform you were involved with, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You should be considering:

• When running a campaign on social media, what platforms did you use and what platforms did you not use? Why or why not?
• How much time was spent creating each campaign, how long did it run, and what was the total spend (if anything) to run it over that time?
• What was the net gain after running the campaign, in terms of new followers or traffic and leads to your site?

The point of this more general look at each social media platform and the types of campaigns you ran on them is to get a feel for how your campaigns performed both in general and for each platform. You can really get a feel for what sites tend to have the best performance, and consider cutting back on the time and money you spend on the platforms that don’t perform well enough.

Examine Your Best & Worst Social Media Campaigns

Now you can start delving deeper into your social media campaigns by analyzing specific campaigns. For this, you should categorize each campaign by different types: videos, blog articles, product advertisements, promotional campaigns, and so on. Now you can start highlighting the best and worst campaigns that you ran, using the KPIs you identified above. After you gather the basic performance data, you can consider the following:

• On what social media platforms did each type of marketing campaign perform best and worst?
• Look at each component of the campaign such as the call to action, the image or creative elements, the ad text, and how you would rate their execution
• Look at similar types of campaigns your competitors ran to see how your campaigns stack up in comparison

This will help you isolate the campaign types to see how they performed in general, and how each campaign within a given type performed relative to others of the same type. You can then look at planning how to improve your social media campaigns in the future, whether it’s confining certain types of campaigns to the platforms on which they perform the best, orimproving your calls to action or ad creative, or the best times of day to share a blog article, and so on.

Analyze Your Impact