How to Conduct a Social Media Audit

In this blog I'm going to share with you how you conduct a social media audit. 

We're at the early stages of the year and you should be thinking about your social media strategy. 

But you can't truly undertake a social media strategy until you've completed your social media audit. 

So what's involved? 

1 - Undertake a brand and a governance audit of all your social networks 

That means looking at whether your brand is seamless and consistent right across all social networks? 

Looking at profile photos, header and banner photos and also looking at the imagery. 

Perhaps you're going to update your visual brands for this year. 

2 - Look at a best practice checklist

Understand if you are adhering to best practice across each social network. 

Remember they change all the time. 

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, they're always introducing new platform updates, so make sure that you are adhering to those. 

3 - Governance

Who has access to your social networks? 

Do staff or volunteers who no longer work in the organisation have access? 

You need to make sure they're removed. 

Do you have a policy in place, a social media use policy for staff? 

But also a social media policy in terms of how social media managers access those accounts? 

Do you have at least two administrators on your facebook page? 

Make sure you're not using dormant or fake accounts, profiles to access facebook pages. 

4 - Performance Audit

The social media audit from the branding and the government's point of view need to be undertaken first, then you undertake a performance audit, so the performance audit assesses where you are now in terms of social media metrics. 

It's not just all about followers and fans and subscribers, it's more than that. 

It's about your engagement rate. 

Is your engagement rate on par with public sector and government? 

Take a look at my 2020 social media report for government and public sector (Read that here). 

Also in terms of social media performance metrics, what about weekly growth? 

Is your account growing week on week?

Engagement rate and weekly growth for me are the top two social media metrics that tell you if your accounts are successful or not. 

Other metrics that you'll want to look at in your performance audit are;

The frequency of the publication of posts, so how many posts are you publishing in any given day? 

How many does that average out over a 28 day period? 

Another thing that you'll want to look at is top performing content and worst performing content, so really understanding the types of content that is resonating with your audience. 

Then finally you will want to have a look at post type. 

So what is the percentage breakdown of the types of posts that you are creating? 

Web links, photos, carousels, videos, live streams, stories. 

Look at content format and content type and really understand how they are performing and maybe you need to increase the number of videos that you're producing, maybe you need to increase stories and live streams in 2021. 

Undertaking an audit gives you a picture of where you are and this is the starting point for the 12 or the 18 month period ahead. 

5 - Competitor analysis 

Now obviously government and public sector agencies aren't in the business of competing with other agencies in your sector, but what you want to do is you want to see what are the performance metrics of the best performing agencies in your sector? 

So for example; 

Are you in health? 

Are you in education? 

Are you in policing and defense? 

Are you in citizens rights? 

Are you in local government? 

Are you a national government? 

Have a look at other agencies in your own country, but also in other jurisdictions and do a comparison, and that will then help you understand what goals and key performance metrics to set for the year ahead. 

I hope that was useful, if you'd like to learn more about social media, develop a strategy and become competent and confident in all of the social networks, why not consider taking our professional diploma in social media for government and public sector;

https://psmi.kartra.com/page/smdiploma

Joanne Sweeney

Public Sector Marketing Institute