How Do You Know If Your Social Media Is On the Right Track?

Social media may have been around for over ten years—in fact Facebook celebrated its ten-year anniversary this past February—but for many companies, social media is still new. Companies and brands are used to traditional advertising and they’re prepared to spend money, update their strategy with the times, and branch out into new markets. But when it comes to social media, these concepts are an afterthought. It’s still too new! So how do you make sure that you’re doing the right thing when it comes to your social media presence?

 

Conduct a social media audit of your brand or hire someone else to do it. This means that you take a serious look at your social media and you rank yourself on what you think you’re doing right and what you think you’re doing wrong. Some areas to keep in mind:

Social media strategy—do you have one? Is it appropriate? How often do you revisit your strategy?
Social media execution—are you actually implementing your strategy? Do you have a social media team that is writing content, monitoring, and working on your social media day in and day out?
Aesthetics—is your social media pleasing to the eye? Just like with regular advertising, customers are overwhelmed by the visual impact first and foremost.
Messaging and Voice—are you using the appropriate voice in your social media content? Does your voice match your brand or do you sound like an 18-year-old intern?
Content—what type of content are you putting out there? Does the content resonate with your fans and does it represent your brand? Does your content help reach your marketing goals?
Engagement—are you having a one-sided conversation or are your fans engaging with you and are you engaging back?

 

You should also take an in-depth look at each of your social media platforms and rank how well you think you’re doing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. An audit like this, conducted once every six months, can help you stay on track in your social media.

 

But what if you want to take it one step further? If looking at your own social media isn’t enough, then it’s time to take a look at your competitors. Choose your top five competitors and see what they are doing. Are all of your competitors on Instagram but you’re not? Do your competitors share more or less content each day? What type of content? Your competitors can give you a great baseline and help you decide if what you found in your internal audit is on par or if you were being just a little too nice to yourself.

 

Reviewing your social media isn’t easy. You need to be objective and you need to know what you’re doing. Take a look around the MCP blog to get a better idea about what you should expect out of your social media and if that’s too much work for you, give us a call. 800.627.1265

This post was written by Kelly Vo. Kelly is the Strategy Director with Media Connect Partners.