Our Guide to Conducting a Social Media Audit

01/08/2020 | Share:

It’s always important to keep a check on how your social media channels are doing every now and then, especially if you are hoping to make e-commerce sales. An audit may sound like a long and boring inspection, but at its basic level, it’s simply reviewing your social media e-commerce efforts in a structured way. Think of it as spring cleaning for your social media.

What is a social media audit?

For e-commerce businesses, it’s a way of making sure your social media is driving sales. A social media audit involves collecting data from your social media activity and analysing them with the intention of finding ways to improve. This includes the type of posts and media you share, your audience, your ads, which channels you’re on, and more.

Why conduct a social media audit?

Conducting a social media audit allows you to take a step back from your current strategy and take an inventory of your social media marketing efforts in order to improve. You can get clarity on where your sales efforts are gaining you engagement or conversions.

In short, a social media audit helps you to get rid of what doesn’t work and do more of what does. And the more stuff works, the more sales you’re going to achieve!

How to conduct a social media audit

Create a space for your findings

The first thing you need is somewhere to track all of your findings, positive or negative. This could be in a spreadsheet or a document, whichever you feel most comfortable with, as long as it’s recorded. You’re going to keep coming back to it.

Track down all accounts

Did you sign up for TikTok only to abandon it when you had no more video content? Look for everything related to your business including accounts you may have abandoned. You can track yourself down by performing a simple search within all of the social media platforms you can think of, or even through Google. Try asking whoever manages your social media channels to check their email inbox for social media signup confirmations.

When hunting down your channels, you may locate some pages that appear similar to yours. If you don’t recognise it, invest a little bit of time social media stalking them to see if they’re associated with you in any way. If not, it may be an impostor account! These can sometimes happen and they’ll only damage your business’s reputation and credibility on social media, if you don’t take action.

Abandoned social media accounts can say a lot about you too. A blank page suggests you’re no longer operational, whereas a page that doesn’t exist simply suggests you might be active elsewhere. Sometimes it may be best just to delete abandoned accounts if they’re not serving a purpose. But don’t do that just yet, this audit will check whether it still has a purpose or not.

Whilst performing this search, take note of any social media channels you don’t have a presence on, and whether you think you could benefit from using them. For example, did you know you can make shoppable pins on Pinterest, where you can tag products in your images?

At the end, make sure you’ve got a list of all the account details in one place, as well as a list of any fake or fan accounts you need to take action on.

Check for consistency

Now that you’ve got an idea on the status of your accounts, you need to work on making your accounts as consistent as possible. This simply means that from the content, tone and style, people should be able to tell it’s your brand.

One way to make a start on this is to check your profile/bio/about text is the same or very similar across your platforms. You usually only get one space for your website too, so make sure each page has a link to either your homepage or your current promotional campaign.

Check the purpose

You need to ensure that the social media channels you’ve chosen are appropriate for e-commerce. These are normally social media networks that are focused on the visual. You’ll likely find that Pinterest and Instagram are great ways to show off your products.

Research social media networks to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and this will help you decide the following which to keep, abandon, ignore or sign up for. You may find an interesting and novel way to use a social media platform to support your e-commerce store.

Being on every single channel is OK, but you need to devote plenty of time in order to share quality content. Use this step to also see if you can repurpose content for a specific channel. For example, you might find that sharing an infographic on Pinterest about how to use your product is a great way to repurpose YouTube video content.

Also think about what competitors are using a given social media platform for and assess whether it’s working for them. What would you do the same as them and what would you do differently?

Auditing your content

In order to improve, we need to evaluate what already works and what is falling flat on its face. Take the time to look through your most popular posts or tweets over the past six months.

Note down which content performed well, which content could have done better and which content sadly failed. Did these posts affect your sales in any way? Perhaps you shared a great lifestyle image on Instagram that really drove sales. Maybe upon review, you find a negative comment attached to one of your posts that may have put people off following your brand or making a purchase. Keep using the content that performed well and see how you can improve the average content.

Using the content that failed, we have an idea of what to stay away from. However, it doesn’t mean 100% that this content is cursed. What if one post performed poorly, and another similar piece performed really well? By looking deeper into these posts, you may be able to identify other factors that affected it:

• The time of day
• The context
• How long since you last posted
• Competitor posts at the time
• Number of followers
• User-generated content

Analyse your audience

Your audience is also something to think about in your social media audit. Take a look at the people who are interacting with your content. Are these the right people? Are these people who could potentially buy from your website? Think about whether your content is tailored for an audience that would want what you’re offering. 

Put your plan into action

Now comes the fun part! Once you’ve got everything together, and you’ve a greater understanding of your social media channels, you can now work on actioning your findings. Did you find that your video content works really well on Facebook? Have you discovered your competitors are using more appropriate images sizes for social media? Get on it!