How to Self-Audit Your Social Media

By: Caryn Terradas

A self-audit lets you know if what you’re doing is working. It’s important every now and then to take a step back and look at your social media as an outsider and see if things are as effective as they could be.

Make a List

The very first step in your audit is to make a list or spreadsheet so you can keep up with all the information as you do your audit. You need to list out all of your platforms so you don’t miss any then list out each of the elements of your platforms so you can check them off as you go. This will make your life easier.

Check Profile and Cover Photos?

Check all your headshots, cover photos, and video thumbnails. Does your profile picture look like you? If not, it’s time to update. You need a current, professional picture that looks like what you look like right now. I’m sure your kids are great and you have the cutest dog ever. They don’t need to be in your profile picture. It needs to just be a headshot of you. Save the family pictures for your personal profile page.??

Make sure your photos are up to date and not from when you graduated high school 10 or 50 years ago. Another no-no is using a heavily edited image as your profile picture. It shouldn’t look like you were shot through a Doris Day filter. It should look like the you a potential client will meet in real life.?

Complete and Edit Your Facebook and LinkedIn Profiles

Start with the profiles first before you move on to the business pages. Facebook and LinkedIn are where your profile tends to cross over into the personal and professional side so you want to check and make sure they’re working for and not against, you.??

Your Title on LinkedIn needs to be your “What’s in it for me?” statement. Make sure your profiles on both are connected to your business page. Your employment should be listed as your company. If you have a business page but under employment you have “self-employed”, that’s not helping you at all. It needs to be the actual page so that you can have that active link to get people there right on your profile.??

If you’re a realtor, don’t link to the broker’s page. Link to your own personal page. Your broker has all the business they need. You need to promote yourself.

?Check your contact information for accuracy. I can’t tell you how many LinkedIn profiles I’ve seen, even for people who are job hunting, that have zero contact information. How are you supposed to get business or leads when there’s no way to reach you? You also have to monitor your inbox in case they actually try to contact you.

?Check your birthday on Facebook. It’s fine to have the month and day of your birthday on Facebook. If everyone knows you were born on January 5th, that’s awesome. Do not put the year. It’s nobody’s business. It’s a security issue. Make sure no one can see the year.

Check the About Section on Each Platform

?There is an about section on every platform. Go through and make sure your branding is consistent. If you tell people on Facebook that you help buy and sell homes in Hoover, that’s what it also needs to say on LinkedIn and Instagram. It doesn’t need to be “I help people buy and sell homes in Hoover” on LinkedIn and “I help people buy and sell homes in Jefferson County” on Facebook. Be consistent in your branding across all platforms.?

?Review and optimize your about section if possible. Is it accurate? Does it really state what you do? You are so used to what you do on a daily basis that you can easily forget how other people perceive you or the services you sell. Ask yourself if it’s working for you. More importantly, ask someone else. Let someone who doesn’t know what you do read your about section and see if they can accurately describe what you offer.?

?Don’t forget to complete your summary on LinkedIn. Seriously. There are so many summaries on LinkedIn that aren’t finished. LinkedIn wants you to finish. They will send you constant reminders to add the elements you’re missing. Sure it’s a bit of a pain to do it but you only have to do it the one time. Once you’re done, updating isn’t quite so painful.?

?Check and Redo Your Hashtags

Ensure your hashtags are correctly branded and the right message for your company. It’s also important to make sure they aren’t currently being used by others, such as the adult film industry, or anything else that might reflect negatively on your brand. Hashtags change so don’t rely on the list you came up with 2 years ago. You need the big ones that tell your industry, the small ones that tell your company, the regional ones that tell where you are, and then the others, such as #throwbackthursday or #teamtuesday, that are unique to that specific post.?

?Insights and Analytics

?Some people tend to think this has to be super confusing or overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. This is where your spreadsheet comes in. Look at each of the platforms and decide if each of those platforms is working for you. If you’re not getting any engagement on Twitter, do you need to be on Twitter? Probably not. There are so many platforms to choose from not that you want to make sure you’re spending your time the best way possible. Most business owners can only handle 1 to 3 platforms. It’s a lot to manage 24/7 so don’t waste your time where you’re not getting results.?

?You also need to decide if you want to add a different platform. TikTok isn’t new anymore and it’s taking over the world. It hit one billion users in September and it’s coming for Facebook. Is that something you need to consider? Maybe, and now is the right time to go in and look at that possibility.?

?Next, you want to look at your analytics and notice the times you are performing best. You also want to take a look at your best and worst performing posts. There will be a trend. It might be that all the posts with your dog score the best and all the ones that are political score the lowest. Whatever it is, pay attention to that because it needs to dictate your actions in the future.?

?Review Your Content Calendar

?Check to see if your content calendar is working. Let’s say testimonials outrank everything else you do and you’re only posting them once a month. It might be time to add them to your content calendar twice a month. If it’s working, keep doing it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel but make sure that your content calendar is updated based on your analytics and insights.?

?Also, check your content calendar for new dates. If you are a hot dog vendor and you miss National Hot Dog Day, that’s not good. Make sure those national days and months that you need to pay attention to are on your content calendar. You can find the complete list on the National Day Calendar website.?

?Check Out Your Competition

Don’t spend a lot of time on this step. Imposter syndrome is very real and prevalent among business owners. Check out your competition, see what they’re doing, and let it go. The only person you should be comparing yourself to is you, your business, and where you were last year at this time and 5 years ago at this time. Don’t get bogged down in what another company is doing. They may be in their endgame while you’re right in the beginning stages of what you’re doing. It won’t serve you well to constantly check on and compare yourself to the competition.

?Instead, you want to look, once a year, at what they’re doing and see if there is anything you like that you can incorporate in your own way. Use it as a source of inspiration and nothing more.?

?Review Who You Follow

?Now is the perfect time to review who you follow and clean up that list. If you’re no longer working with a specific company or industry, purge it. If your Aunt Fanny is constantly posting about her alien abductions and it’s making you crazy, unfollow her or hide her. You don’t have to subject yourself to that. If there is negative talk, you don’t have to subject yourself to that. Do what you need to do to clean up your feed.?

?Check the Social Media Icons on Your Website

?Next, check your website and make sure the social media icons are actually working and that they’re all there. These links break more often than you’d think so check them at least quarterly to make sure they are working. You don’t want to spend all this time going through and making sure all your stuff is good just to have people not be able to find you.?

?Post Consistently

?Lastly, you want to make sure that you are posting consistently. Are you posting on the regular? Does your social media appear relevant or was your last post from a month ago? For social media to be effective, it has to be consistent.?

Ready to Self-Audit?

If you are ready to start your self-audit, follow these steps. If you are currently too busy or overwhelmed, we can help. We have auditing services starting at $300 for a regular audit with additional cost for a deep dive audit where we acquire your analytics and go more in-depth. Let’s chat!