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Social Media Savvy: Performing a social media audit

Milena Regos
Out & About Marketing

Your social media strategy is important, whether you’ve been doing social for awhile or just starting to get your toes wet. An audit will look different depending on where you are in the process of launching, preparing, or executing your social media strategy.

Running a social media audit helps you identify opportunities for your business, competitive market in the social space, and shape your strategy moving forward. It shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes.

There are three primary portions of the social media audit, each with their own purpose:



• Clean-up

• Competitive



• Internal

Let’s focus on the clean-up portion. It’s where you will identify social properties that are inaccurate, unofficial, or outdated. Often, third party users, well-wishers or naysayers will create an unofficial account for your organization. This content appears quickly, and can negatively impact your brand and social objective.

Identifying these properties is an important portion of your social strategy. The way that you search for these unofficial presences is simple — use search engines within the social platform, using common keywords associated with your brand, your brand’s name and logo, and your brand’s mission or value statement.

This will often provoke these unofficial properties to appear in search results. The reason why you should do this? It’s two-fold:

1. Some of the properties may be violating copyright or trademark laws, giving your brand the authority to close the group, or request a name change to disassociate that property with your official brand.

2. They may be parody accounts, negative accounts, and areas where disgruntled consumers are sharing experiences. It’s important information, because this content can be repurposed for your social content strategy. Use consumer feedback and addressing it on your official properties is a great way to combat negative sentiment and trends.

Social media strategies should always incorporate consumer feedback as a backbone and driver of the presence. Consumer feedback is invaluable to our companies, and also fellow consumers.

A recent study confirms that 94 percent of users trust feedback and information from people they know, versus the 14 percent of users who trust marketing content from our consumer websites.

Accessing this information, and sharing it with your users, while addressing it on your terms, provides you a powerful tool to hone your social media strategy, all identified through the first step in your social media audit.

Next time, we’ll cover the competitive portion of your brand’s social media audit.

Milena Regos is principal and founder of Out & About Marketing, an Incline Village-based digital marketing and social media consulting firm. She can be reached for comment at milena@outandaboutmarketing.com. This article first appeared on http://www.outandaboutmarketing.com .


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