What are the steps to audit social media and analyze competitors?

1 Set your goals

Before you start auditing your social media accounts, you need to define your goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve with your SMO efforts? How do you measure your success? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to you? Some common goals for SMO are increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving traffic, boosting conversions, and enhancing customer loyalty. Depending on your goals, you will need to track different metrics, such as followers, impressions, reach, engagement, clicks, shares, comments, mentions, reviews, and conversions.

3 Analyze your performance

Now that you have reviewed your profiles, you need to analyze how they are performing in terms of reach, engagement, and conversions. You can use various tools, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, and LinkedIn Analytics, to collect and visualize your data. You should look at both quantitative and qualitative data, such as the number of followers, the growth rate, the reach, the impressions, the engagement rate, the sentiment, the feedback, the click-through rate, the bounce rate, the conversion rate, and the return on investment (ROI). You should also compare your performance across different platforms, time periods, and content types.

4 Identify your audience

Another important step in your social media audit is to identify your target audience and understand their preferences, behaviors, and pain points. You can use various sources of information, such as social media analytics, surveys, polls, reviews, comments, and social listening tools, to gather insights about your audience. You should segment your audience based on different criteria, such as demographics, psychographics, interests, needs, challenges, and goals. You should also create buyer personas that represent your ideal customers and tailor your SMO strategy to them.

5 Research your competitors

After you have audited your own social media presence, you need to research your competitors and see how they are doing on social media. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, Sprout Social, or SEMrush to find and analyze your main competitors on different platforms. You should look at their profiles, content, keywords, hashtags, followers, engagement, sentiment, and reputation. You should also identify their strengths and weaknesses, their unique selling propositions (USPs), their opportunities and threats, and their best practices and mistakes.

6 Create an action plan

The final step in your social media audit and competitive analysis is to create an action plan that outlines the steps you need to take to improve your SMO results. You should use the SWOT analysis framework to summarize your findings and prioritize your actions. You should also set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and assign roles and responsibilities to your team members. You should also monitor and evaluate your progress and adjust your plan as needed.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?