What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is the digital version of a doctor’s check-up for your brand. Essentially, it is a process that is used to ensure that your brand or company is performing in a healthy manner in an online space. A successful social media audit can provide detailed performance information and other, useful analytics. These can then be used to design an actionable plan to help your brand perform even better in the future. In order to pick a successful auditing service, or conduct an audit yourself, there are several things to look for.
What to Look For in an Auditing Service?
Scheduling Features: If you are performing the audit yourself, schedule it. An audit should not be a randomly applied process, rather, it should be performed regularly, at least twice a year. Preferably, if the brand is trying to grow, an audit should be performed quarterly. If you are using an auditing service, look for one that allows scheduling features, instead of having to call or email an audit request on each occasion.
Marketing Inclusions: SEO details and public relations information should be included in an audit, regardless of who is performing the audit. By asking two departments to work together for the sake of social media auditing, a greater cohesion is formed within the brand. Additionally, it creates more visibility, which often increases brand success.
Grading Methods: If your company is conducting an auditing process on its own, it is critical to create a framework for grading before beginning. An audit will reveal a massive amount of information, however, that information will be useless if there is no way to translate it into a grade or other marker of progress. If creating a framework seems daunting, especially for smaller brands, there are third-party ones available online. For companies choosing to use an auditing service, ensure that the service you are choosing has a good grading system that makes sense to those that must translate it.
Ideally, this grade should be a combination of five components. Firstly, quantitative data. This section focuses on the hard numbers behind your brand: follower counts, customer turnover, leads and the like. Secondly, qualitative data. This section is used primarily for design feedback, site usage notes and similar types of constructive criticism. From these two sections, a third section can be formed. The third section consists of assumptions that can be drawn based upon the first two sections. Oftentimes, there will be several assumptions that correspond to different facets of a company’s online presence. A fourth section, detailing the best practices for a digital brand should follow. Finally, the fifth section should aggregate this data into the recommendations and opportunities for a company to grow and succeed online.
Why You Should Use NetBase for your Social Media Audit
Even with the above information coupled with outside research, performing a social media audit may seem like a daunting task. NetBase is a proven social analytics company that has worked with tons of brands and fostered success. They have six different sets of tools that use smart algorithms to assess different facets of a brand.
Where is the Love?: This toolset contains three different digital tools that can help you assess the sentiment towards your brand.
Where is the Audience?: With four different tools, this set can help you find better channels of promotion.
Content is King: This set contains three tools that can aid in creating better content.
Forecasting Trends: Containing several predictive tools, this set can track long and short-term trends.
Measuring Up: These three tools generate comparisons between you and your competition, to see where you measure up.
How Safe are You?: Finally, this toolset is dedicated to crisis management and keeping the perception of your company healthy.
