Social Media Audits Here! Get Your Social Media Audits Here!

Social media audits here! Get your social media audits here!

How do you know you’re taking the right approach on social media? If you’ve been active on social media for a while and things are going ok, how do you know if you’re missing out on something? If that made you pause to think even a LITTLE bit about your social media strategy, you need to conduct a social media audit.

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit is a review of your company’s (and your competitors’) activity across social media and digital platforms. An audit is the first step in a strategy build or refresh. Taking a deeper look at the platforms you use, how you position your brand and what kind of content you share is a good approach for finding whitespace to strengthen or change your strategy and overall approach on social media. It is also an opportunity to identify gaps left by competitors so you can adjust messaging and targeting to stand out from the noise.

We recently conducted a social media audit for one of our clients in the semiconductor space. We love working with clients in niche industries. Niche on social media presents a unique challenge of targeting and activating a very specific audience. An audit is the best way to understand if you’re reaching and engaging that audience or not. Here’s how we approached this audit and what we found.

The client wanted to know…

1. What were competitors doing differently that drove more social engagement?
2. How can the current approach be tweaked to get even more engagement?

Here’s what we did…

1. Analyzed results to date. We started by looking at the metrics across platforms to see which had the strongest results and which were underperforming. This helped us identify the aspects of their program that were driving real-world results, including content assets, post types and platforms they have already found success with or on.
2. Reviewed overall social health. We catalogued and reviewed each active social profile looking across four specific categories: content strategy, community management, branding consistency, and platform optimization and segmentation. Essentially, we asked, “Does this content make sense to share with the intended audience?”
3. Studied competitors. We followed the same process across competitor channels. We wanted to know what they were doing, where they were doing it, and how well their audience was responding to it. Were competitors really getting better results or was that just a perception because they had flashier content?

Here’s what we found…

• Facebook was an underutilized channel. The Facebook audience was craving more content with “how to” information. Examining which content types were working best on this channel indicated that the audience consisted primarily of end-users. They got excited about any content that could help them implement products into their projects better. Tailoring content to give this audience more tutorials and how to guides would increase engagements and strengthen the community that was already active on Facebook.
• Twitter content reached more people than it engaged. When reach is high, but engagement is low, the indication is content does not appeal to the audience. There was an overwhelming amount of content being shared on this channel. Our takeaway is there was some content fatigue going on. Audiences know that social media is all about the content but seeing too much of the same from one company is tiresome. Changing content cadence – specifically, reducing the volume – could improve audience engagement. Less content means audiences are delighted, not bothered, when new updates are shared.
• Competitors seemed like they’re doing “better,” but perception was not reality. Competitors with significantly larger audiences had far less engagements and fewer meaningful engagements that drive business results. Poor optimization on post copy was impacting overall engagements from the audience. While the content may have looked nice and the audience size was large, the results were falling flat for competitors.

Knowing what was working and what wasn’t allowed our team to use the audit results to inform a social media strategy build. That’s the real end goal of doing an audit – taking the insights to custom build a strategy that gets results.