With companies relying more on social media to increase brand awareness and customer acquisition, ensuring your social media accounts have maximum impact has never been so important.
A simple way to make sure your social media accounts are set up effectively is by performing a social media audit. A social media audit helps you assess your social channels and identify issues and areas for improvements.
Here are four vital components you should consider in a social media audit:
1. Whether you've included social sharing buttons on your main website
Social media buttons are icons placed on blogs to help readers share articles conveniently (example below). Social sharing buttons are important because they boost content sharing significantly. According to JeffBullas.com, social sharing buttons can increase content sharing by 700%! This means that if your current articles get an average of one social share, adding social buttons could help them receive seven!
To add social sharing buttons on your blogs, use plugins such as Shareaholic, AddThis or ShareThis.
2. Whether your brand logo, slogan, or name is presented consistently across all channels
Using variations of your brand logo, slogan, or name on different social channels can confused your consumers. To remove confusion, ensure your brand elements are presented consistently across all channels.
Hootsuite is a good example. They use HootSuite as their account name on all their social channels. Visually, they use their animated owl brand logo when they customize their profiles on all their social networks. This consistency strengthens their brand recognition and recall.
3. Whether you're engaging in cross-platform promotion
Cross-platform promotion refers to encouraging your social media fans to follow your other social media accounts. An example of this would be providing reasons for your Facebook fans to follow your Twitter account and YouTube channel; you could offer content or promotions not available on Facebook.
This promotion engagement helps you extend your reach because you will connect with users who are only active on certain social channels. When your Facebook fans follow your Twitter account and retweet your content, you reach Twitter users who are only active on Twitter and not on Facebook. This social reach expansion will help increase your social following and attain better social media marketing results because you will engage with more users when you publish a social post.
4. Whether you're tracking your social content's click-through rate (CTR)
Social media is often used as a free promotional tool to push content. Therefore, it's important for you to determine whether your fans or followers are actually clicking through to read your articles or other types of content.
An easy way to track the CTR is by using a social media management service such as Buffer or a URL shortener like Bitl.ly. These tools display how many clicks a piece of content gets, where the readers are from geographically, and when they clicked on the content. This information helps you determine when's the best time to promote your content or what kind of content (i.e how-to articles) or headlines get most clicks so that you can make adjustments to improve results.
A social media audit is a quick, simple way to assess your current social media performance. By conducting a social media audit, you can determine whether your brand elements are consistent across all social channels, whether you're engaging in cross-platform promotion, whether you've installed social sharing buttons on your main website, and whether you're tracking your social content's CTR. This assessment will help you identify issues and areas for improvement - a major part of continuously improving your social media marketing performance.
If you have any questions about social media audits or think there are other vital components that should be included, feel free to contact me at @theraywang!