The sicial media audit process involves the examination the company’s metrics in order to determine growth, opportunities, and what can be done to enhance your social media presence and reputation. The word audit might seem sophisticated, but the truth is that social media audits are simple non-tedious but important processes of any company seeking to grow online.
It’s shocking how many businesses have no idea how many social networking pages they have. Alternatively, they might be aware of the accounts but have been left out of others. Many organizations perform social media audits on a yearly basis; however certain key components of the audit could be missed if not done frequently.
Skipping or forgetting a few steps in the audit process can jeopardize a company’s ability to manage social media risks.
The social media auditing process
Gaining a clear picture of your brand’s web presence is the first step in conducting an audit. Consider your website as a corporate asset. The asset elements are all the information within the website that populates on the customer’s side, including content, images, avatars, apps, metadata, etc. This is the first piece of knowledge a consumer gets about you, the company, or the service, and it’s from here that you can keep brand and regulatory enforcement levels in check for risk management purposes.
When carrying out a social media audit of your company, you check for the following:
- The strategies that are working and those that are not
- The presence of imposter accounts that may be stealing your customers and prospects
- The dormant profiles that need to be revived and those that need to be deleted
- Opportunities for growth
When selecting a social media auditing service, you need to ensure it covers all four phases of the auditing process to give you a clear picture of what you’re working with:
- Discovery phase: This is the process for locating all corporate-owned, third-party, and fake websites that are associated with a company’s name. During this phase, your business should be able to identify the corporate web presence, third-party web presence, and property infringements such as counterfeiters and phishers.
- Network Auditing: This is the process of examining all social media accounts across all channels and those responsible for them. This process determines whether they align with the company’s social media strategies.
- Content auditing: This is a review of the company’s content strategy. Is the account involved in terms of posting and reacting to feedback and questions? Or are the account’s administrators letting it go dormant and leaving customers in the dark? Inactivity and a lack of responsiveness, once again, would damage your brand.
- Brand Presence Auditing: This is the process of examining the material of a social network page, such as logos, avatars, cover art, and business details.
NetBase Quid is the expert in social media analytics and has been delivering contextual business insights to businesses across the world, helping them connect with their customers, understand their competitors, and come up with strategies to improve their online presence. NetBase Quid enables brands, organizations, and advisory services consumers to make smart, data-driven decisions reliably, easily, and reliably by processing billions of indexed content from all types of structured and unstructured data using advanced artificial intelligence.
The cost and time
A one-time social media audit service may cost you about $300-$5000 depending on the service you choose and the type and number of accounts you’re auditing, and it can take about 30 minutes or less to complete an audit. If you’re worried about the costs, then you should sit back and think of the cost of damage repair after an accidental poop emoji appears on a customer’s comment page. An audit can help you manage this crisis by giving insights on who was responsible, including the time and date. You also don’t want previous employees accessing your company’s social media accounts.
On that point, it’s critical to emphasize that a social audit is not a one-time thing. Regular checks should be conducted to guarantee that all is in order, and you should keep an eye out for any improvements in the way the accounts are running. A quarterly social audit is an excellent way to ensure that you equate your daily work to the objectives set out in your social networking plan on a regular basis and that your social media pages continue to have the highest return on investment.
