This is the final post in my "How to Do Your Own Social Media Audit" series! If you haven't read the first post, you can click here to read it.
Once you are comfortable with writing a strategy and implementing it, or even while you are implementing your own social strategy, taking a look at your competitors' social media is a good plan. If your competitors aren't doing well at social media, than you can one-up them by being great at it. If your competitors are doing well, than you might be able to find something you can mimic and get good results from for your own social media!
Finding Competitors' Social Accounts
Do a search for all of your major competitors on all of the social networks and determine how they are doing.
- Do the accounts exist?
- Are the profiles filled out?
- Do they have an avatar?
- Are they active (do they post regularly)?
- Are they interacting with their fans/followers?
If all of the above is true, and you can answer "Yes", this is the time to find out what posts are particularly interesting to their fans/followers (because those are your target market too!).
Are photos getting the most "likes" and comments? Are questions? What kind of content are they sharing that you can also share? How often are they posting?
Trying planning a new strategy around what you learn about your competitors and try it out! By now, you should have a good idea of what is working for you, how to create a strategy and follow it, and you should no longer have any fear of changing things! Congratulations!
Once you have success on one platform, you can begin focusing on the next. Sometimes, you will get great results; Other times, you may not. The point of a social media audit is to learn and adapt. If you find one particular platform does poorly on a continuous basis, you might consider spending much less time on that site, but don't stop updating. Activity might encourage engagement, and keeping things updated helps you in search and authority.