Even without having access to their private data and password-protected accounts, you can still adapt this process to perform a social media audit for a competitor and create a key document in your business’s competitive analysis. Are there any platforms with an account whose life and death preceded your time at that company? You might think you can list all of your social accounts off the top of your head. Free Social Media Audit Template; What is a Social Media Audit? Here’s a toolkit you need for successful social media ads campaigns in 2020. Record the name of each social network you use in this column. If it’s not, then that indicates that your best type of content is an effective strategy to make an impact in the competitive landscape. You’ll need to look at each social account individually. Image Source It can feel like a full-time job to grow a following on Instagram. If you’re using social media to market your business, you need to understand how to perform a social media audit. Include any miscellaneous notes that are relevant to that social media profile that are important to take into consideration when you’re determining how the findings from the audit will guide your strategy. social media audit template excel Excel Daily April 28, 2020 0 Christopher Lockman It does not have a LIKE function, but you can use the COUNTIF function to pretend that it does. Any profiles that slowly stopped receiving TLC a while back when they failed to serve any goals? A social media audit is an opportunity for you to think about your goals. On your social audit document, indicate the channel owners, and whether you’ve set each account up using a tool to control passwords. Overwhelming? Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order. When: Since it’s hard to evaluate your social metrics in a vacuum, it’s a good idea to compare your results with the same time period last month, or last year. As you can see, performing a social media audit isn’t nearly as daunting as it seems. Save time and money with the most affordable social media management software on the market. We’ve compiled our top data-driven resources from 2020 to help you plot the right course for your business moving forward. But don’t assume that covers all your bases. Watch the replay video or read the recap below for updates to Fanbooster’s media. Find your most engaging posts on this network. What about Nextdoor? Use this free social media audit template to help you get organized in 2020 and start adding social media value to your company or clients. You’ll be able to spot at a glance: In this guide, we explain everything you need to know to conduct an effective audit of your social media channels. Work towards having all accounts set up with centralized password control by the time you do your next social audit. Here are a few of our takeaways: Additionally, update profiles without proper branding, find missing logins, or make any other necessary changes. I ran through the above audit with Buffer’s social media profiles, and I’m happy to share with you our results and my experience. Any flags or penalties you’ve received for things like this are a good candidate for the notes section. Read on to discover why this tool is great for your social media, download the free template, and learn how to use it. Are you accomplishing what you set out to do when you began building your brand on social? 13. A social media audit is a process you go through when you hunt down all your organization’s social media channels, compiling as much information as you can about them. If you aren’t currently using Google Analytics or UTMs that allow you to differentiate between sources and mediums, skip this column, but it may be something you want to implement into your strategy going forward. You’ll become a master at all of them with enough practice. 1. These decisions don’t have to be forever. Record the current number of people following them on each network to compare to your profiles on those same networks. For each social account, you’ll want to record: You should also include a column for any relevant notes about the account. Think about your goals for each account. It also ensures you regularly circle back to compare the work you do day-to-day with the goals outlined in your social media strategy. June 29, 2020 Like previously discussed, an in-house social media audit is meant to be a checklist of sorts. However, with, On this month’s Fanbooster Office Hours, we were all about Media. Get a holistic view of where your current efforts are and aren’t, and where they should be. This post will walk you through each step of filling out each column of the template in a strategic way.. Once you’re done here, be sure to check out the ClickMinded social media marketing course for a more detailed overview of how to get more traffic from search engines to your business. Return on investment can take many forms, so make sure to think about ROI in terms of the specific goals for your social accounts. Indicate if the platforms you’ve chosen and the core components of your strategy still align with the demographics of your target market. Instead, it simply means compiling key information about each of your social media accounts, all in one place. With the addition of IGTV, Live Stories, and Instagram Reels, Image Source Facebook has been a powerhouse channel for marketers for years. Add the link to each social media account, so members of your team have a streamlined place to find the profiles and so you can quickly offer up the link for any emails, press releases, etc. If any of these things sound like benefits your business needs, let’s begin the social media audit process. SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT TEMPLATE Discover, categorize, evaluate brand social talk with social search and categorize data by Who: list who is talking, company, consumers, competitor. Start your 7-day ReportGarden free trial. Have you audited your online presence? But be prepared to escalate matters to the social networks for help if you can’t resolve things yourself. Running a social media audit isn’t something that needs to be done weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. What are you really trying to accomplish in your social media presence? But in this case, it doesn’t have anything to do with the tax authorities. and environment (look and feel).What: list type of content (article, photo, video, plus sentiment). This will be helpful in the future as any of your branding or messaging changes—it will indicate to you that you need to update social profile branding again if these changes occur after the most recent date you documented updating the profiles. Average number of website sessions from social. Like discussed earlier, running a social media audit is most useful at the start of planning a major social media strategy revamp. Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox. A competitor template is also available here. But keep in mind that ROI is not all about dollars. Are you in compliance? In your audit document, record all unowned accounts and make notes about the steps taken to have these accounts shut down. This part of the template is for a quick glance at overall performance. Like discussed earlier, running a social media audit is most useful at the start of planning a major social media strategy revamp. Use your audit to find social networks you should post more to, and see if there’s any networks you can get rid of. The full spreadsheet can be viewed on Google Drive, and a screenshot is below. Social media ads guidelines. Note that this template uses Facebook ads as an example, but you can select the data source of your choice. Excel | Smartsheet. In this article, we are going to tackle everything about performing a fast social media audit: A social media audit is simply tracking down all the places that your business has a presence on social media, and compiling key facts about each presence in one place so you can see the whole picture. But for an overall picture across social channels, Google Analytics is your best bet. Report to any stakeholders and executives at a high level on past performance, assets, and strategy. This will give you insight to the rate that it has accumulated followers and may help indicate if it’s current with company goals and branding. We’re going to break this down into a series of simple tasks that anyone can execute quickly. How to Create a Strategic Social Media Plan [Template] Editor’s note: Given the ongoing need for brands to handle their social media plan more strategically, we updated this previously published article. protect the security of your social accounts, only the right people have the right access, whether impostor accounts are stealing your fans, which outdated profiles you need to revive, repurpose, or shut down. Record all the available information from the list below, make inferences where needed, and make a comparison to your in-house audits. Or use a tool like Hootsuite Insights to understand audience demographics across all channels. Record this as a yes or no answer based on any mentions or direct messages from customers requesting support. If not, you may want to consider pulling back on certain channels so you can focus your energy on the ones that provide the best return on investment. Using the Mobile Technology and Social Media Policy Template: Guidance Notes. Trusted by employees at 800+ of the Fortune 1000. Running a social media audit isn’t something that needs to be done weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. Rather than giving various team members the password to your social accounts, it’s important to centralize the passwords in one place. It doesn’t have to be like that for your business. Only record the actual password if the document is password protected. This lightning fast social media audit might take you an hour now, but it will save you hours (dare we say days) later. Here are the components to check for each social account: For each account, record which three posts had the most engagement*. Record the name of each social network they use in this column, and use a search engine to find accounts associated with variants or outdated versions of their company name and leadership similarly to the search you did for your internal audit. Is the password known and available to all that need it? Advanced analytics tools like Hootsuite Impact can provide a detailed analysis of your social media ROI. Mark down the average number of posts they post per day to help determine if you need to post more or less in order to compete with them. It’s meant as an inventory and organization tool, not a way to track your social growth or engagement. For example, if you’ve been posting twice-daily to Pinterest and notice your key demographic isn’t responding, you may want to axe it and move resources elsewhere. This is also a great moment to take pause and consider if they seem to be getting satisfactory responses, and if you need to work with customer success team members to determine a process for solving these problems. Firefly Marketing has developed an easy-to-use 2021 social media content calendar template for you to use in your social media and Google My Business planning. Understandably so, since the platform boasts 2.6 billion monthly users worldwide. The good news? Hint: If you plan to start working on your audit as you read through this post, download our free social media audit template (above) now. We personally recommend adding links or screenshots of 3-5 top-performing posts, so that it’s enough to see a small trend. Download Social Media Audit Template. Track down and uncover past social media efforts that can be deleted or repressed, and prevent unforeseen consequences of those accounts that could be brand-damaging. Find this in Acquisition>All Traffic>Source/Medium and then your chosen source and medium. Average # of likes: (Plus, a bonus resource to help you share those plans across your org for maximum impact). Evaluate your current social media efforts using this free template. the top three posts in terms of engagement, 2-3 SMART goals you want to achieve by your next audit, whether you met the goals you set for the current audit. Record your averages in your template. Number of followers: This will be at the top of your company page info on each social media platform. Don’t be alarmed—a social media audit is nowhere near as scary as it sounds. You already knew this happened—you were there—but often you need to view information in the aggregate to see where huge holes exist in your strategy, or where a large amount of resources were wasted over the last few months. *We suggest engagement as the metric to track here to evaluate your best-performing posts. After using our social media template and gathering your data in one place, you’ll be ready to design the perfect social media strategy going forward—piles of receipts, forms, and files that you pictured when you heard “audit” not included. To keep this organized in your spreadsheet, you can create 3-5 separate columns to log each post in order of performance. For example, if your business typically posts 5 different types of content each week, yet you notice your top 5 highest performing posts for the entire year were consistently all links to blogs that feature industry experts, this is a helpful insight for your content planning. For example, using LinkedIn to “build B2B connections that are likely to schedule a demo.” Hint: If you have the exact same goal for every platform despite their vast differences, you may need to make some adjustments. Mark the date that you confirm that you’re updated on the latest rules. Instagram with link to the profile] [e.g. That person is responsible for ensuring the account is on brand, up-to-date, and performing well. We start our list with this highly visual Social Media Proposal template for 2020. This is another metric that can indicate if the profile is being leveraged in their current strategy, or if it’s a social network that they’ve forsaken and you can shine on. Tedious? Use this template to plan and track your social marketing budget with a spreadsheet view as well as visual metrics. Facebook Ad Performance Overview. Starting Point: There are a few factors to consider while choosing the right social media channels for your business, here is a blog post to help you get started – How to choose the right social media channel. When purchasing your Social Media Marketing Plan template, you will also receive the below: + Social Media Strategy Presentation Template – On google slides ready for cross-team collaboration, you can also save it as a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation. Edit the many graphs, charts, and infographics this social media marketing proposal has to offer. What words come to mind when you hear “audit”? If you do see that happening, and providing support isn’t included in your goals for the profile, something may need to be adjusted there. Insight into Buffer’s social media audit + a free template for you. Let’s face it: “audit” is not a pretty word. total engagement numbers, engagement rate, click-throughs, etc. Think about ways to tie each account back to your social media marketing strategy. I hope you found this social media audit template helpful. 4. Using it, you’ll be able to derive more insight into how effective your content is on social media. The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Post Lengths in 2020, The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Image Sizes in 2020, using LinkedIn to “build B2B connections that are likely to schedule a demo.”, How to Find Hashtags That Will Make You Stand Out on Instagram, Instagram or Facebook? We’ve also created a free social media ROI calculator that anyone can use. Check each of the elements against your brand style guide to ensure you’re using up-to-date images, hashtags, keywords, and brand voice. If you find that this is different from the target demographics that you’ve consistently parroted from marketing goals, you may have to reconsider your presence on that platform or reconsider your business’s target market. We make it easy to schedule posts, monitor your mentions, and view results. Social Media Proposal. For most brands, website traffic and conversions are good metrics to track here. Maybe these were abandoned at some point. You already know the “why”—all of those business-flourishing benefits—now let’s cover the “when” and “what” so you can get started. If possible, put the date they created the social account here. Simple: Use it to guide your social media strategy and use it to build your social media schedule for your business. Base these recommendations on all of the information you’ve gathered in previous steps. Include any miscellaneous notes that are relevant to that social media profile. “Audit” can be a scary word. Or Byte? These are all worth recording. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Once you’ve made a copy or download it, feel free to colorize, brand, and customize to make it your own. Videos? Picking the Best Choice for a Competitive Edge. © 2021 Hootsuite Inc. All Rights Reserved. For more consistent and in-depth competitor reporting, you can connect competitor profiles on Fanbooster. You don’t need to use all these tools. Using Google Analytics, determine a period of time (for example, maybe you choose how many website sessions you got this month from social media sources, so next time you do an audit you will know to again use the sessions for the most recent month) and record how much traffic social has driven to your site. Instead—for tracking your social media metrics—use Fanbooster’s advanced reporting tools. This free toolkit features: [Report] The 2020 Sprout Social Index ™ [Guide] 2020 Trends and 2021 Predictions Do customers use this as a customer support channel? Boring? A social media audit creates a clear picture of your current social efforts and shows you the best way to improve results. After all, engagement on your social channels is nice, but real return on investment happens when followers become leads or customers. Founder, Backlinko.com. The social media audit is the process to evaluate and assess the business organization‘s social media profiles and strategies. This field needs to be the actual demographics of who has ended up following you. Input the demographic of their followers on this social network using the same fields that you used in your internal audit so that you’re able to make easy comparisons. Keyhole. Playing out a web-based life review can help web-based business organizations remain over their online nearness. A Facebook post’s organic reach is only around 6.4% of the page’s total likes (SocialMediaToday). You can use competitor audits to find ways that your competitors are outperforming you. Social Media Marketing Budget Template. What’s on tap? Download Social Media Audit Template. Check if the bio, cover photo, website links, pinned tweets, and profile pictures are up-to-date, then mark “yes” or “no” for up-to-date on that profile. In order to allow you to digest this big picture view, a social media audit is a document that must remain high-level with key facts—not a place to get bogged down with comprehensive tracking of performance metrics. Schedule posts, engage the audience, see results, and much more. It’s meant as an inventory and organization tool, not a way to track your social growth or engagement. Make a note if you find any accounts that require further research. What about a personal account from a very high-profile member of leadership who uses social media, often on behalf of the business? Whether you’re just starting out on your social media journey or already getting results from social, performing an social media audit is a fantastic way to take stock of all your social media assets. You should conduct regular audits to ensure everything is on track, and look for changes in the way your accounts are performing. SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS TEMPLATE Place specific social media plan objectives across the top with objectives such as increasing awareness, increasing engagement, or improving customer service. Price: Starts at $49/month after a 7-day free trial. Then you can start thinking about whether you should add them to your social strategy. 13. Create new goals for the next period based on everything you’ve learned. You can also set up tracking with your Cyfe Google Analytics Dashboard. Download the Social Media Audit Template Auditing your social presence shouldn’t be a time-consuming task. 18. How to conduct a social media audit (with free templates) By ShareThisDecember 12, 2018 Best Practices No Comments 0 You won your social media proposal. Add the link to each social media account. Want to try the social media audit template yourself? This gives you an always-updated look at your social media, and lets you take an in-depth look at what is and isn’t working for you social media. After all, it’s impossible to evaluate your performance when you don’t know what kind of performance you’re trying to achieve. This person will also be in charge of necessary approvals on the account, and will guide its strategic direction. For example, Snapchat users tend to be much younger than Facebook users, and LinkedIn users tend to have relatively high incomes. If you follow what I’ve outlined in this article, you can complete yours in as little as 30 minutes. Save time on social media by managing all your accounts from a single platform with Hootsuite. But engagement might not be the best metric to measure for every brand. Once completed, you’ll have a better understanding of where your brand lives on the web, and hopefully good insights on how to improve. You can find some of this information for Facebook using Facebook Analytics, as long as you’ve set up the Facebook Pixel. For example, there might be old profiles created before your company had a social strategy. To properly audit social media accounts connected to your company, you’ll need to do a bit of legwork. Anna Dievendorf is the Marketing Manager at. + “The best 4 Charts every social media manager should use” – Guide. your social handle (for example, @hootsuite), the link to your profile (for example, instagram.com/hootsuite), any hashtags that appear in your bio or regularly appear in your posts, the internal person or team responsible for managing the account (also known as the “owner”—for example, the social marketing team), the mission statement for the account (for example, to promote company culture using employee photos, or to provide customer service during office hours), details of the current pinned post (if applicable), date of the most recent post (to help you identify underused/abandoned accounts). Or see our complete library of 20+ other marketing templates . We’ve compiled all the top statistics you need to know about who uses each social network in a series of demographics guides: However, it’s important to analyze the demographics of your specific following on each social network, as your follower group may not be the same as the overall audience. This template emphasizes visualizing data in an easy-to-understand way. Test your theories and record your results the next time you perform a company social media audit. Bonus: Get the free social media audit template to see what’s working and what’s not. Social media audits are absolutely essential to developing a new social media marketing strategy. Created Date: 06/26/2020 04:13:00 Last modified by: As long as you can create 3-5 separate columns to log each post order... Theories and record the actual demographics of your current social media efforts this... Ensures you regularly circle back to compare to your social media audit isn ’ t, and LinkedIn tend. Maybe a team, within your company, you can ’ t need to use these! These posts to look for patterns the element that requires a little guesswork regularly circle back to compare work... Free social media audits are absolutely essential to developing a new role the... Post ’ s more to social media campaigns using Fanbooster each post in order of performance media metrics—use ’! Social accounts successful social media audit process follow what I ’ ve gathered enough now! Organization ‘ s social media platform you use to identify networks where you don t!, monthly, or even quarterly up with centralized password control by time. And find similar ( and free ) social media marketing strategy is for a social media marketing strategy, bonus. Through this procedure that the e-commerce business can be at the time of the responsible... On behalf of the audit steps or a similar spreadsheet that works for you keeps... Account: for each social media accounts connected to your profiles on Fanbooster to say that a social platform. Uncover during your audit document to record the name of each social account here time I comment you need successful... First step in any social media audit ] [ e.g the template includes monthly and annual totals, start. Don ’ t have anything to do when you post photos require research. Up following you on each network with a spreadsheet any other necessary changes and. Scary as it sounds free ) social media accounts, it makes more sense to evaluate optimize... Right template over time, you ’ ll need to do when you post photos most,. Where: list by social media effectiveness template is designed to help you analyze your social using... Member of leadership who uses social media, but there ’ s password for help you... Respond to the social account should be “ owned ” by one have... Tracking with your audience do when you began building your brand, up-to-date, then! Simple tasks that anyone can use can help web-based business organizations remain their. Hunt down these components, streamline your documentation by populating this template or similar! That this template to plan and track your social media audit the platforms you ’ re going to break down! Complete guide on how to perform a social media accounts a financial app shocks! Expand your reach audiences visiting the particular website taken to assess and streamline a business how each channel designed help. You don ’ t, and infographics this social media audit isn ’ resolve. % of the audit promoted social media audit is most useful at performance! Users tend to have relatively high incomes personal account from a very high-profile member of leadership who social. Use this social network the market a key metric here to look for your business person responsible... Longer with the demographics of your choice is the first step in any social media audit is simply stepping... After a 7-day free trial media profiles and systems of individual posts ll uncover during your audit,. This field needs to be the actual demographics of your social media marketing.! Track engagement metrics that don ’ t nearly as daunting as it sounds your... This step by revisiting your goals for the next time I comment “ owned by... Executives at a high level on past performance, assets, and then your chosen source and medium competitor. Template uses Facebook ads as an inventory and organization tool, not a way to here... About whether you should add them to your social accounts assess and streamline a business each network to compare your. The business high level on past performance, assets, and much more you find accounts! Use in this article social media audit template 2020 photo, video, plus sentiment ) social! A while, and where they should be adding links or screenshots of 3-5 top-performing posts, the! And where they shine online presence before you get into 2020 the most engagement * of. That account to accomplish personal account from a single platform with Hootsuite media Policy:.