A Quick Social Media Audit Checklist to See How You Are Doing
Mar 28, 2022[trx_quote cite="#" title="Mandy Green"]Have you ever done a social media audit to see how you are really doing?[/trx_quote]
A Quick Social Media Audit Checklist to See How You Are Doing
Coach, you know that having a presence on social media is an important communication tool for this generation of recruits. Especially for those coaches that must deal with the new rule changes and are now not able to recruit so young, social media will be a huge tool you can still use to tell your story and giving your recruits the insider’s look into the personality of you and your team.
Have you ever done a social media audit to see how you are really doing? You can learn a lot from an examination of how you manage (or don’t manage) your online brand.
Maintaining the social media presence for your program to help your recruiting really could be a full-time job. We all know that is virtually impossible because so much of your coaching job requires your time and attention be spent elsewhere. Social media profiles can fall into disrepair quickly when left alone. An audit can help get things back on track.
On the flip side, there are those of you who actively maintain social media profiles and take great pain to keep everything updated and cohesive. Audits are helpful in these instances, too. They can serve as much-needed opportunities for reflection and growth.
Basically, audits are helpful for everyone, no matter where you’re at with your social media presence. Today, I just want you to examine how you are currently doing things. In future newsletters, I will offer up suggestions as to what you could do to make improvements.
Social media audit checklist
- Locate all your social media profiles and then document all of the following elements:
- The social media network
- The URL
- Your profile name and/or description
- The number of followers or fans
- The date of your last activity
- Who is currently responsible to post on each platform?
To keep all of this information organized and to give you a starting point for any follow-up audits you might want to perform down the road, create a spreadsheet like the one below.
- Next, make sure that your presence at these places is purposeful. You can consider asking some of the following questionsto determine the necessity of certain profiles.
- “Why are we using this social account?”
- “Why do we want to use it?”
- “What are our goals for this social media platform?”
- “Are our recruits using it?”
If you no longer have a good reason to use the account or you find that your recruits are elsewhere, don’t hesitate to cut ties and focus your effort where it is better spent.
- Check for completion of all details on these profiles and for consistency in imagery and message. To check to see that your branding is consistent across your social accounts, check to make sure:
- Are all avatars the same?
- Do backgrounds and other images follow theme/branding?
- Are all descriptions and URLs uniform?
You might find that it is best to have a different feel on different social networks—Twitter might lend itself more toward a laidback personality because that is where you recruits are whereas Facebook might require a more professional presence because that is where the parents mostly are. In this case, consistency doesn’t carry quite the same importance as making sure that the tone of the profile is right for the network. Think environment first and consistency second.
- How is your social media performing? That is likely going to be one of the top areas of interest when you perform an audit. Is your social media marketing doing as well as you hope? To follow up on this, you can check in with your past goals and the performance metrics you’ve created. Here are some common metrics you can measure:
- Your followers and fans. See how your audience has grown over time by using tools like Facebook’s page insights and Twitter’s Followerwonk.
- Your posting frequency. Is there any correlation to how often you post and how your audience grows?
- Engagement. Dig into how many conversations you have on a weekly basis. Engagement can include direct contact, retweets, likes, +1s, and re-shares.
Again, this information can be organized into your main spreadsheet so you can see quickly at a glance if your profiles are performing the way they should. (If they are not getting you the results that you want, change what you are doing!!).
One helpful part here is bench marking. How do these numbers compare to where you were a year ago? Two years ago?
Many stats and tools will go back this far automatically, so you get these numbers with relative ease. For the rest, be sure to document the important metrics today so you will have a baseline to return to the next time you perform an audit.
