How to Conduct an End-of-Year

SOCIAL MEDIA AUDITThat Will Drive Results & Impress Your Boss

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The End-of-Year Social Media Audit

While social marketers tend to think in terms of real-time and future campaigns, it’s as important for us to look back with a holistic lens to identify key successes, failures, and lessons for the future. Social media teams manage a large number of channels geared towards massive audiences. This annual check-in (which doesn’t have to be in December) can help put it all in perspective.

Performing a thorough end-of-year social media audit is an essential part of any marketing function, and can give you insight that you won’t get by analyzing short time-frames. This analysis that will help you improve your programs, and report your progress and state-of-affairs to your VP, CMO, or other executives.

Completing Any Audit Requires Three Basic Steps1. Collect and organize data

2. Analyze data

3. Report on findings and recommendations

An end-of-year audit helps you understand where you are excelling and where you can improve, giving your brand a competitive edge and providing valuable insight into customer desires.

An end-of-year audit helps you ensure that your team is on the same page, deploying insights from social analytics.

An end-of-year audit can help you streamline processes, identify trends, and learn what it takes to drive real business value for your brand.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to perform a comprehensive audit of your brand’s social accounts to define and drive business objectives, and provide insight into the real ROI of your social campaigns.

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Benefits of a Social Media Audit

Conducting a comprehensive social media audit can hep your team in a number of ways, helping you understand the past, prepare for the future, and align with stakeholders. Here are some of the potential benefits.

• Discover what people are saying about your brand or your industry for reputation management

• Manage your marketing strategy and show your team how to build advocacy among your brand’s target audience

• Align the current state of your social media activity with your departmental goals and objectives

• Give your brand a competitive edge by better understanding your customers’ wants and needs

• Ensure that your social media team is unified and aligned under a common strategy

• Identify areas to streamline your process

• Gain insight into the real ROI of your social campaigns

• Improve long-term planning and product launches

• Develop a list of findings to share with your boss, and other areas of the marketing department

If you’re ready to develop a playbook for your end-of-year audit, let’s get started.

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What to Audit: The 5-Prong Review Process There are five areas of your social marketing program that you should review as part of your audit.

1. Network Review

2. Policy Review

3. Activity Review

4. Competitive Review

5. Business Impact Review

By focusing on each area, you’re able to find unique insights that pertain to each specific concern.

Network Review: Were You on the Right Social Networks? First, get a holistic view of all your social profiles and assets – where does your brand have a presence, and which social networks are you currently leveraging?

This chart from Simply Measured’s Cross-Channel Social Performance Report shows brand posts over time from any major social media network.

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Once you have a complete inventory, you’ll be ready to dive into the analytics that will help you determine how your social media presence measures up.

For each social network, answer the following questions:

Is my brand largely active, reactive, or inactive?

It’s important to understand which networks you’ve treated as a priority by posting regularly, reacting to user posts, or ignoring all together.

How have my recent efforts affected my social goals?

How are my organic and paid efforts working together?

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By identifying the tactics that you changed throughout the year, you’ll be able to zero in on trends throguhout the year, and where you should either change focus, or continue to focus.

In order to understand the full impact of your social programs, it’s critical to identify the impact that paid activities have had with your audience and engagement metrics on each network.

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Policy Review: Were Your Social Media Guidelines Effective? You’ll want to determine whether or not you have a social media policy that’s applicable to your network presence.

Your social media policy will include things like:

• Who creates the content to post?

• Who posts that content?

• What rules govern the content being posted?

Your policy should outline guidelines for post topics or types based on your brand’s “voice” (photo, video, links or text) and guidelines for responses to users mentioning your brand.

Your policy should also include guidelines for monitoring metrics associated with your active social networks, performance indicators, and troubleshooting.

For example, if your brand focuses on having stellar customer service, you’ll want to determine whether or not your brand needs a dedicated customer service handle on Twitter. If so, you may need to ensure you have an appropriate policy to route customers to that handle for customer service issues. You’ll want to set goals for response rate and response time when users mention your brand.

In addition, you should know how to handle different types of social posts mentioning your brand – whether they’re positive or negative.

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Activity Review: What did you do in the last year? What were the results? Ideally, you developed goals for social activity throughout the year, and an expected return, but if you didn’t, it’s not too late.

Step 1: Define what successful “activity” and “results” are for your brand

When you were planning for 2015, did you come up with a minimum amount of brand

activity for each network, or commit to upping your brand activity on an emerging

network so you could see what kind of lift you could generate for your brand? Now it’s

time to find out if you succeeded or have room to improve next year within the plan

you created.

In terms of results, an average of 40,000 in total Instagram engagement per month

might be on the low end for another brand but on the higher end of the spectrum

for your brand. You might also want to look at total engagement across all your social

channels at once, not just on a network-by-network basis. Maybe your brand isn’t

focused on engagement at all -- perhaps the number of impressions you receive is

how you gauge whether this year’s been a good one or not. The point is, you’ve got

to define what “good results” mean for your brand.

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Step 2: Identify the metrics that matter to you

Start with brand activity across all relevant channels.

Break that brand activity down by content type to identify successful tactics on each

network.

By analyzing content type by channel throughout the entire year, you’re able to

mitigate outliers that come from viral successes as well as flops.

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Identify key changes to audience growth. Find the dates that spurred statistically

significant changes in audience growth, and analyze the activities your brand

engaged in during those times.

Do the same with engagement trends.

Step 3: Develop recommendations for your 2016 strategy

Use your findings to build the foundation of your plan for next year. For instance, if

your brand suffered a slump during a particular month, identify the reason for that

slump, and develop a plan to overcome it in the coming year.

An audit is only as useful as you make it. Take this opportunity to understand the

past, but make sure that you use that understanding to impact the future.

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Competitive Review: What Can You Learn from Others In Your Space?

An end-of-year competitive review will:

Inform Your Research and Direction: You’ll have fresh perspective and renewed

sense of direction in 2016.

Give Context to Your Efforts: Benchmarking your KPIs against competitors can

give you context for performance, teach you industry best practices, and inspire

you by revealing what the most innovative social marketers are doing on a continual

basis.

Step 1: Determine Who to Audit

Who are your brand’s top competitors when it comes to revenue?

For instance, if you’re Beyoncé, you might look at other high-grossing musical artists who you know are dropping an album around the time you are, or going on tour at around the same time. If you’re a smaller brand, look at companies in your industry who you lose customers to on the most regular basis.

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Who are your brand’s top social competitors?

Which brands are excelling when it comes to the following metrics, and/or picking up a lot of press?

Which metrics matter with competitors?

Activity - what did they do? 1. Posting cadence 2. #hashtag usage 3. Response rate 4. Content typeResults - How effective was it? 1. Fans/Followers: totals and growth rate 2. Impressions: potential and actual 3. Engagement: totals and engagement per post

You won’t know the answer to these questions off the top of your head, but you’ll probably have some good guesses. Make a list of who you think your brand’s top competitors on social, then validate it by looking at a report which includes all these competitors.

You might find that a brand you think of as a big fish on social is actually seeing a decline in audience growth, or that a brand you added to this competitive set on a whim is blowing you out of the water when it comes to impressions. Running a report which shows you how you stack up against your competitors is the only way you’ll find out for sure.

Who are the brands you look up to?

Remember that these brands don’t have to be direct competitors for wallet or even on social. These are just brands you see doing cool, innovative things on social and reaping rewards from those risks. Or they’re brands with the kind of engagement you can only dream about. They don’t even have to be in your industry.

So, why should you break your brand’s competitors out into these three separate categories for benchmarking? Because this process and analysis will help you clarify which kind of competitor each brand represents to yours, and help you put successes and failures into context.

This process creates a perspective shift and alerts you to your double or triple threats — those brands which fall into two or even all three categories.

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Step 2: Determine What You’ll Research and Measure

Narrow Your Data Set

Narrow your data set so you can have better focus. Choose the 2-5 brands excelling in your space, and get specific about what these brands are doing, using the leaderboard model as your guide.

Look Across All Your Channels

Look at what your 2-5 competitors are doing across all their active social networks, even if you’re only focused on one social channel. This will provide you with the context you need to optimize and understand your benchmarking for one particular social network in context.

Stay Up to Date

Monitor keywords and competitive campaigns on a continuous basis to make sure your benchmarks are still relevant as your brand’s top social competitors evolve, hire new agencies, start a fresh campaign, and plan content around a big event.

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Business Impact Review: Did Your Social Strategy Align with Marketing Goals?

Aligning with marketing goals can mean a number of things. It’s important to first

understand where social can make the biggest impact for your specific business.

Is it directly driving revenue? Promoting brand awareness? Helping customers better

understand how to use your product?

Getting this insight can be tricky, and require a lot of trial and error, but there are

some things you can do to get close, quickly.

1. Sentiment analysis: Which content resonates most with your social audience?

2. Surveys: Ask prospects and customers what value they get from your social

channels?

3. Conversion analysis: Which content gets users to click through to your site?

Whatever you determine is your greatest impact you can have as a social team,

there are specific strategies, activities, and KPIs that map to that impact. Social Metrics Map

Expose target audience to brand content

Posts, promotions (boosts)

Impressions, reach SOV, Top of Mind AwarenessCreate awareness

Generate engagement of target audience with brand content

Posts, responses # of engagements, types of engagements Visitors/traffic (online or offline)

Generate demand

Drive target audience to brand offers Posts, promotions Link clicks

Conversions (purchases, lead sub-missions, app downloads)

Drive conversion

Drive engagement with brand product/services

Responses (i.e. social customer care)

(positive) earned mentions, customer care metrics (responses times & qty)

Sentiment and satisfactionDelight customers

Activate customer influencers

Posts, outreach to influencers, reshares

Earned impressions, earned reach, social UGC

Referrals, influencer activity, positive word of mouth, NPS

Inspire evangelism

OBJECTIVEBUYER’S JOURNEYSOCIAL MEDIA

STRATEGY SOCIAL ACTIVITY SOCIAL KPI’S BUSINESS IMPACT

PRESENTED BY:

BUYER'S JOURNEY STAGE A person relative position to a buying decision

MARKETING OBJECTIVE The brand’s desired outcome from a marketing activity

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY The brand’s plan of action to achieve the marketing objective

SOCIAL ACTIVITY The social actions the brand must take to execute strategy

SOCIAL KPI’S The results of the social actions taken

BUSINESS IMPACT The downstream effect of the social results on the business

DECISION

ADOPTION

AWARENESS

ADVOCACY

CONSIDERATION

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Reporting and Recommendations: How Do You Share Your Findings?

Once your audit is complete, you will need to share those findings with your team.

There are two types of reports you’ll want to develop.

1. An Executive Report: This is what you’ll share with your boss, other

departments, and key stakeholders. This report should be easy to consume, with

metrics that are easily mapped to business goals, and recommendations that are

high-level and help enable the entire marketing organization.

2. A Team Report: This report is for your social team, who will be using the insight

to improve performance in the coming year. This report will be more tactical, and

include metrics that inform content ideation and activity. Recommendations here will

be focused on the day-in, day-out tactics that your team is focused on.

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The Executive Report

Your executive report is how you’ll share your progress with key stakeholders

that aren’t on your social team. The main audience will be your boss: Your VP of

Marketing, CMO, CEO, etc. Keep that in mind when deciding what to include.

Business Impact metrics and trended period-over-period performance are the types

of things your execs want to see.

Use the business impact map mentioned before to identify the KPIs that matter to

your boss, and report on those in an easy to consume way.

Along with your report, be sure to include a bulleted list of findings, and

recommendations. This section should highlight the successes you’ve seen

throughout the year, but also be brutally honest about the failures that came with it.

The goal here is for alignment and buy-in, and your CMO or VP will be able to see

through any spin you put on this process.

This is the top section from a Simply Measured Executive Dashboard, custom-made for a Simply Measured customer. This report is crafted specifically for sharing the metrics that matter to marketing leadership within that organization.

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The Team Report

This report is designed to help your social team set goals and perform better in

the coming year, and will contain more granular data than the executive report.

This report type focuses on answering one burning question: How can my brand

set appropriate goals for the future? This information helps you plan and execute

better by looking at previous surges, growth rates, and other benchmarks.

If you have specific metrics you’re reaching for each week, month, or quarter, it’s

much easier to address the impact you’ve made.

If your goal has been to drive more traffic to your blog from Twitter, focus on those

click-thrus to identify successful periods and less-successful periods. If your goal

was to leverage photos and videos more, focus on the engagement those posts

drove.

Recommendations in this report should focus on tactics and strategy for the year

to come.

This chart from the Simply Measured Cross-Channel Social Performance Report shows content types and the engagement per post for each.

ConclusionAs social media matures and becomes more integrated with other areas of the marketing department, it’s becomes more important to evaluate your efforts so you can help your brand grow and prove the worth of your efforts. By reviewing key metrics on a recurring basis - annually, quarterly, monthly, or weekly - and tying your success to company ROI, you’re taking a sophisticated and honest approach to your social media marketing.

Having a solid year-end auditing and reporting plan means that you can explain why your work is important, know when it’s time to regroup, and, most importantly, when it’s time to celebrate.

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