First things first, what is a social media audit?  Well, this simply means that you’ve chosen to take a close look at exactly how your business is currently using social media, whether it’s working for you, and how to use it from this point on to help support your business’s goals.

So here’s a crash course in auditing your business’s current social media approach, and how to get started optimising it:

Step 1: Search Google for Your Business and Employees

When you search for your business or website name in Google, the number one result is likely (hopefully) your main website.  But you’ll also see:

• Articles your business has published
• Mentions of your business (preferably positive) on other sites
• And in particular – social accounts belonging to your business

For example, if your business has an active Twitter account, that should ideally appear on the first page of the results, as will your Facebook page, LinkedIn page, relevant accounts on forums and bookmarking sites, etc.

What this simple search does is allow you to see how the results are looking for your business, what you might need to do about them, and in particular if there’s any results you don’t like (people impersonating or disparaging your business for example).

Doing searches for your business, your website URL, and perhaps also employee names, will help you find lost and neglected accounts.  And in particular here, we’re not interested in the personal accounts of employees (although that can also influence how your business is perceived) but rather social accounts in their name but for the business.

Step 2: Evaluate Your Profiles

So once you have a full and up to date list of accounts, you need to decide which to remove, which to keep, and which to most actively develop.

Questions you can ask about each one are:

• If we develop this social account, how will it benefit us?
• How will any time spent on this particular social platform benefit the business?
• Are our competitors using this platform, how, and are they being successful?

These questions will start to make clearer your goals for social, how to reach those goals, and whether each of the accounts need to be removed, kept but not actively maintained, or kept and actively developed.

Step 3: Optimise Your Highest Priority Profiles

So of the accounts which are most important to you and align with your business goals, first of all you need to fully flesh out these profiles with all necessary information.  And in particular you want to make sure they’re “on brand and on message”, so the business presents itself consistently and effectively across platforms.

Then it becomes a matter of being active on that account and using it to become part of the conversation happening in your market, ideally in time becoming a thought leader that others refer to.

So a social media audit it pretty straightforward, but it does take some careful thought about how social fits into your marketing and brand, and how you can use it help you reach your business goals.