How to audit your social media for beginners
I find the new year to be a really useful time to review past social media content because it informs a new 2022 content plan appropriately. Nobody wants to be be wasting time and energy on strategies that are just not working.
A social media audit is the process in which you review your social media presence and analyse how your social content performed. In this blog post we will be:
Making sure your social media profiles are on brand
Analysing what content is performing best
Understanding your audience
Branding your social media
Social media is an integral part of your businesses brand identity. It is highly important that when existing or potential customers visit your social media profiles that they all look consistent and on brand.
This means that you should make sure that on every social media platform you have:
- The same profile picture
- The same optimised bios
- Consistent tone of voice
- Consistent theme/colouring
Why is this important? Having consistency across your social media platforms means that potential customers start to trust your business and are therefore much more likely to make a purchase from you in the future.
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Doing a brand social media audit is also a good time to check for any missing links in your bio. Links are prime retail space on your social media profiles so you want to make sure that you are using your best and up to date one. It’s very easy to leave a link to a blog post you once wanted to promote and forget to switch it back to your usual, for example homepage link.
It’s also a great time to delete any old profiles that are not being used and could potentially confuse new visitors.
I also find that now is a good time to organise, add to and make sure your instagram highlights are on brand. Think about categories your customers may want to see; testimonials, behind the scenes, about me, your services or different product categories. Make sure that previous stories you have done that fit within these categories are added, it’s so very easy to post valuable content to your stories but then forget to actually add it into your highlights.
TOP TIP
Doing the extra step of making your instagram highlight covers on brand can help to further increase your brands identity. You can simply colour code them in your brands colours or higher a designer like myself to create you bespoke icons for each highlight. Please email: [email protected] if you would be interested in this service.
Social media is an integral part of your businesses brand identity.
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Analyse what content is performing best
Luckily instagram and many other social media platforms makes analysing your best performing content very easy for you.
You will need to have a business account type on instagram in order to see your stats.
Once on your profile click ‘insights’ and you will see an ‘insights overview page’. You then want to scroll down to where you see ‘content you’ve shared’. Here you will see ‘posts’, ‘ stories’, ‘reels’, ‘videos’ and more. I would recommend going through each of these post types and analysing them individually.
Once you click on one of those post types you will see 3 drop down boxes at the top. One will be a post type, one will be a metric and the other will be a time period.
I would recommend keeping your post type to any and because we’re doing a yearly audit change the time period to last year.
That leaves you to play around with the metrics. Which metric you choose to analyse is up to your business individual goals. But have a quick glance at them all, the results could be quite intriguing.
When you have found a metric you want to continue to increase in 2022 take a look at your top 9 performing posts and try to analyse why you think they performed well. For me it’s easy to see that pictures of myself tend to get the most likes. If in 2022 I wanted to increase my likes I need to post more images of myself.
However, yours might not be as easy to analyse as that, you may want to look deeper into your captions and the hashtags you used to see why those posts in particular were your top performing.
TOP TIP
Analysing what performed well on your social media and what didn’t is a continuous process which should be reviewed more often than yearly. Social media is always changing and strategies should be updated and implemented accordingly.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience is the final component for how to improve your social media game in 2022.
To see your followers analytics again click ‘insights’ on your instagram profile. Then click ‘total followers’. When you scroll down you will be able to see ‘top locations’, ‘age range’ and ‘gender’.
These are interesting demographics to analyse and could help inform you in the future who to target for your new products or services. This is because they appear to already be enjoying your businesses content.
However, what I think what will help you the most in terms of improving your instagram game instantly is looking at the metric, ‘most active times’.
This is where you can see what hours and days your followers are most active. This data should then inform you when you should post your content as it these are the times and days it will be most likely to be seen by your followers.
Top Tip
Post just before the peak starts to grow so that your post is ready for followers to see when they’re online.
Summary
I hope that this blog post on how to audit your social media for beginners was an actionable and helpful dip into the world of social media analytics and marketing.
If you’re really lacking in the time or skills for the ever changing and fast growing world of social media and want to hand it over to someone who can give it the time and love that it needs, then please check out my content creation services page.
