7 Reasons to Consider a Social Media Audit Plus Tips for Success

From deep dives into audience insights and content to channel prioritization and strategy validation, I’ve conducted dozens of social media audits in my career.

Audits can identify what’s working and where to focus resources to ultimately drive more ROI from social media.

But when is the right time to prioritize a social media audit project?

CHALLENGE: Align on Challenge and Goal of Social Media Audit

In short, it depends on the current state of your social media program. We most often recommend an audit when we notice one of these challenges needs to be overcome:

1. Budgets are increasing or decreasing. What should we prioritize with our social media resources?
2. Our marketing strategy is shifting. How should we evolve our social media strategy to match?
3. Competitors are crushing it on social media. How do we stack up and what can we learn from their approaches?
4. We feel like we’re on a hamster wheel. What’s the latest in social media trends and how can we breathe new life into our content?
5. Social media performance continues to be just okay. What social media content and ads are working the best and what should we skip?
6. Help! Zuck or Elon launched a new social media channel. What should my channel priorities be?
7. We need to launch or integrate a new brand. What should we do on social media?

If any of those sound like your current situation, it may be time for a social media audit. But how? Let’s dig in.

FINDINGS: Find Your Focus

First, figure out which aspect of your social media program you plan to audit. We tend to recommend focusing on one aspect in audit, such as: community, content/creative, channel, paid or overall strategic approach.

There are loads of social media audit approaches to consider depending on what you choose to audit.

1. Qualitative: Don’t overlook the power of the human eye. Review competitor feeds or ads transparency center. Dig into Pinterest or Google Trends to spark new life into your social media content approach.
2. Quantitative: Native social media channel analytics can be a great place to start. If you’re regularly promoting your posts and running social media ads, exporting from Ads Manager can be even better for benchmarking, seeing what performs above/below benchmarks and looking at content in an apples-to-apples way with “cost per” link click, post engagement or mille. Consider industry studies on how your target audience uses social media. Dive into Google Analytics 4 to see what your social media traffic is doing on your website.
3. Paid: Include your social media management tool like Sprout Social or Sprinklr, tools like Rival IQ, or consider a third-party consultant for fresh eyes. And, yes, we do digital and social media audits.

ACTION: Drive Strategy & Action

Once you have dug into data using the potential approaches above, it’s time to make meaning of the data and conjure up findings. This is perhaps my favorite part of the presentation, where you bring it all together.

• What did you find?
• Is what you’re auditing working or not?
• What tangible steps make sense to do next to optimize and improve?
• Will your social media strategy need to shift and how?

Collaborate with your colleagues. Find opportunities for improvements, both big and small. Make meaning of your findings. And show, don’t tell. For example, if you’re seeing a trend that your target audience is really loving Reddit, find screengrabs and include numbers to bring it life.

OUTCOME: Making Meaningful Changes

At the end, it’s all about what you learned and how you’ll change. Are you going to nix a channel from your social media lineup? Did you realize you aren’t responding to social media fans quickly enough and have a need for enacting a new community response plan? Whatever it is, my recommendation is to align with key stakeholders, document who is doing what with timing and get to work optimizing that social media program of yours.

A good rule of thumb is to update your social media strategy accordingly and periodically assess to see if more audit angles may benefit you in the future.

Now, you’ve either read this far and thought WOW that sounds easy or maybe WHOA there’s a lot to this. If you’re interested in doing a social media audit for your organization, we can help.

An Audit in Action: A CROPLAN CASE STUDY

For one Curious Plot client, we focused on social media as part of an overall integrated strategic shift.

Challenge: When the WinField United team decided its brand CROPLAN^® seed deserved to stand alone with its own personality and digital presence, CROPLAN brand marketers partnered with us to create a campaign with a social media audit to help navigate a new social media strategy with new brand specific social media channels.

Findings: With a target audience solely of farmers for their seed brand, our Curious Plot social media team dug into third-party data and found industry studies that showed Facebook is the #1 channel for the grower audience, along with insights into what farmers look for on social media. We dug into current channel performance for the company and found that the target audience heavily engaged with Instagram. We also reviewed a year’s worth of past social media advertising performance looking at creative in a few ways. We created benchmarks and found what ranked above those benchmarks. Essentially, videos, graphics and UGC were driving the most ROI.

Action: We developed a new social media strategy for CROPLAN with Facebook and Instagram at the core. It was a social media content strategy that leaned into the content types that had historically performed best and a launch plan on how to effectively introduce new social media channels for the CROPLAN brand. New goals included: position CROPLAN as a contemporary seed brand; emphasize its industry-leading genetics and traits; and continue to support focus on enabling retailers to be the hero at the farmgate and reinforce the value of local ag retail.

Outcome: Since launch, the new CROPLAN Facebook channel has gained over 4,000 followers, and both the Instagram and Facebook channels have seen very good engagement rates. Plus, the CROPLAN team has received incredible feedback from the field and sales team with the new strategic direction of its social media program.

Interested in a social media audit for your organization? Contact our social media team!

Christina Milanowski has more than 18 years of experience in marketing and communications with the majority focused on social media strategies for B2B and B2C clients.