Full Service Social Media Marketing

After a long dreary winter, spring has finally arrived! And that means it’s time to start your spring cleaning! You clean your home, your car, your yard… everything gets a refresh. But did you ever consider that it might also be a good time to refresh your social media strategy?

Completing a social media audit is an integral part of your social media marketing plan. It is important to understand how well your strategy is working and if it needs to be revamped.

Essentially, a social media audit is an examination of your brands social profiles and how they’re performing. During the audit ask yourself questions: Am I using the right social networks for my brand? Do I have social accounts that I’m no longer using? What social networks are bringing me the best results? Is my content optimized for each social network and all of its recent feature and algorithm updates?

Check Analytics

A good place to start this daunting task is to create or download a template. Hootsuite has an awesome social media audit spreadsheet template you can use! By filling out this spreadsheet you will be able to clearly see how your current social media profiles compare to each other over time and if they are delivering results.

During this step you can also see if there are any imposter accounts that have been created in your name but aren’t actually affiliated with your brand. If you do find one, you can ask the owner of the account to delete it or you can talk to the social network to see if they can intervene.

This is also a good time to search for accounts that you may have made on social networks that you no longer use. For example, maybe you created a Youtube account for your brand prior to re-branding and that account hasn’t been deleted. (It doesn’t look good when you have an account with 15 users, 3 uploaded videos and an old logo that was created in 2013….😳) Now is the time to delete these unused accounts or, start to beef them up!

Make sure that all of your accounts align with your current branding. Your social networks need to be consistent; from the bio to the URL to the logo. And if possible, get your accounts verified.

Do the Research

Look into the analytics of all your accounts over the past few months or past year. How are you doing over time? Is the number of followers growing? Are you getting conversions on your product through social? What do your engagement, link clicks, shares, referral traffic, impression rates look like? Take a look at how your competitors are doing. Do they have 10,000 followers on Twitter when you only have 800? At this point start to look into the current trends for each social media network. The algorithms change over time so the way you write your copy and the way you use hashtags needs to change with the trends. Critically examine the frequency and time you are sending out your posts. Do your posts perform better early in the morning? Do you get more engagement on Facebook when you just post once per day? Obviously there are lots of trends to keep up with, so keep yourself informed! (Hot tip: Subscribing to our blog is a good way to stay up to date.)

Single out which posts do well for you. Find your posts that have the highest engagement rates which include likes, shares, comments. Make sure that you are targeting your posts to the right audience. If you are not reaching the audience that is interested in your products then your efforts will all be for nothing. You can find your best performing content by looking at the analytics tabs on the social site you are conducting the audit for. By understanding why these posts do well you can change the way you write your copy, change the time of day you post, change the frequency of posts or maybe even change your target audience completely.

Make Some Updates

Once you determine what works well for your brand (and what doesn’t) it is time to implement these changes. Update your social strategy and make new goals and objectives for the month or quarter ahead. You have all the information in front of you, now let's put it to good use! Break down the changes into manageable goals and focus your attention on one aspect at a time. For example, one month focus on increasing engagement, and the next month focus on increasing your followers on a certain network.Trial different types of content, copy and hashtags, as well as post frequencies and times of day and keep a close eye on the results. See what works best for your brand!

The key factor to take away from this is that you can't "set it and forget it". Having a strategy to get you started is great, but you can't just execute it robotically forever. You have to continually audit and update, integrating new trends and responding to the changes social networks implement. It's relentless, but it's key to keeping your social media efforts effective.

If this all seems overwhelming... don't fret! We are here to help. Contact us today to order a custom Social Media Strategy for your brand, or to find out how our team can take social off your hands entirely ensuring your efforts start and stay successful, month after month, quarter after quarter. If this all seems overwhelming, we are here to help! We offer custom Social Media Strategies to set you up for success!

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