Why is a Social Media Audit Important And Audit Stages

And why is a social media order important? Well, data is knowledge, and knowledge is power. As you can see from this quote, data helps you to make really informed decisions, rather than using guesswork.

The information sourced through a social media audit can be extremely valuable, because it identifies branding errors and inconsistencies, facilitates quality control, so if more than one person is looking after your social media content and activities, it helps to make things a bit more consistent. It also identifies the content and tactics that are working so that you can do more of that. I mean, really, in terms of continuous improvement with your social media activities, it’s all about doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

It also highlights who your audience is, and it helps you to really understand more about them, so then you’ll be able to connect with them in a much more effective way. The order also provides you with inspiration in relation to what your competitors are doing, and I’m not saying that you need to copy what they’re doing, but it gives you ideas on what’s working well for their audiences, and what is also falling flat, so then you can take ideas and craft them to suit your audience as well, and your business. By also understanding what your competitors are not doing, it provides you with a really great opportunity to fill that gap.

So in this video, I’m going to take you through the three essential pillars of a social media audit. So as you can see here, and we’ve covered this a little already, it’s about what you’re doing, your activities. Next, it’s about your audience. Understanding your audience is central to any form of communication, particularly on social media, because it is about being social. Remember, it’s a two way technology, and understanding your audience helps to facilitate and generate that conversation with them, and that relationship-building aspect of social media too. And thirdly, it is also around your competitors, just understanding more about what they’re doing as well.

So in this video, I’m going to take you through the four essential stages that are necessary when conducting a really effective social media audit. Now, the first stage is conducting the audit itself. So gathering the data from those three pillars that we covered from your own activities about your audience, and then about your competitors.

The next stage is you really need to analyze that data to pull out meaningful information so that you can use it in order to make some really helpful decisions to improve your social media presence. Now, once you’ve analyzed the data, that’s when you synthesize it into the development of some really clear action items. So these will be very specific, around what you’re going to do to improve your social media activities.

And finally, the fourth state is the implementation stage. So what happens with a lot of businesses is that they will gather the data and learn what they can do to improve their social media activities and performance, but they never actually act on it. They never implement it. And data is useless unless you’re actually using it for that continual improvement.

So by the end of this video, you will know how to conduct an audit, yes, but you’ll also know how to use that data in a really actionable and meaningful way to completely improve your social media activities and performance.

The information and knowledge that you gather from this social media audit process will also be an extremely valuable first step in the social media strategy development process, which will be the focus of another video in this series. Now, let’s begin with the first part of our social media audit, assessing our own social media channels, presence, and activities.