A social media audit can be a great way to evaluate your position on your social platforms and is essentially a review of what’s working, what’s not working, and how to better spend your time on social media. Because it’s important to remember that since you are trying to build an audience and draw them in, you have to be creating intriguing content not only on your streaming or posting channel but on your social channels as well.
It can be a good idea to create a spreadsheet and note down all of the important factors in each of your social media channels. This will help you identify trends, issues, where you’re thriving, and where you’re currently floundering.
Table of Contents
Which Social?
First, you will need to gather together all of your social media accounts that relate to your career as a content creator. These can include but are not limited to; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. Anywhere you are promoting your content and engaging with followers, potential or otherwise, is up for audit.
You first want to make sure all the possible information on your profile is filled in and complete. If it’s a social account dedicated to your gaming and/or content creating career, make sure your display name or handle is your channel name. If you are using multiple names across different mediums, it can lead to your audience missing certain portions of your content or just getting confused. Your display name/s should be consistent with the names you create content under.
Profile
Leading on from ensuring all of your information is clear and up-to-date, you are going to want to visit each and every one of your social media pages and see how everything looks. How does your profile picture look? Is it too blurry or close up? Does it clearly show who you are, or some branding regarding your channel? Is your banner (if any) clear, engaging, and not too convoluted?
In terms of content, is there a good variety in the type of content, spanning images, videos, and written posts? Does the flow of content look too spammy or in-your-face? Looking at each of your social media channels in this way puts you in a potential viewer’s shoes. If it’s too much work to figure out the page or your content, a potential viewer may lose interest. As a content creator, your job is to entertain, inform, and engage with your audience, not stress them out.
Tone Of Voice
Each social media platform brings something different to the table, which is why it attracts certain audiences. Undoubtedly, most people have used almost all types of social media in some shape or form and use each for different purposes. At this stage in your audit, you should be assessing your ‘brand’s’ tone of voice and how it is applied to the different social networks. Are you conveying your goofy, happy-go-lucky side on your social media, a more competitive in-the-zone persona, or a mysterious, enigmatic ideal? Your tone should be consistent and if it isn’t, you will need to ensure you remain ‘on brand’. Again, this persona should be similar to the one you embody on stream or in your videos.
Now that you have locked down your tone of voice across your socials, you need to ensure your content and tone are suitable for each platform. LinkedIn is a networking site for professionals to connect with other professionals and so tends to be more formal. Twitter is great for announcement messages and engaging with people using snappy messages. Instagram is for the visual visionaries, creating captivating snapshots of gaming life. And Facebook is optimal for developing deeper engagement with your audience.
If your tone or style doesn’t fit a platform or cannot be tweaked to fit a platform, your efforts may potentially be wasted trying to increase your presence on those particular forms of social media.
And, most importantly, check your content for anything problematic. It could have been a silly post a few years ago you thought was funny at the time but hasn’t aged well or something that could be misconstrued as discriminatory. If you’re looking to monetize and connect with brands, be prepared for them to audit your social media as well.
Metrics
Now that the aesthetics and content of your profile have been analyzed and optimized, it’s time to focus on the metrics. Most social media platforms will allow you to view your progress and stats to determine how to draw in more followers. You want to pay particular attention to your Follower count, determining whether it’s dropping, growing, or staying the same over prolonged periods of time. If it’s consistently dropping, that is a sure sign something isn’t right and you need to try and figure out why.
While it can sometimes be disheartening to see numbers declining, it’s important you take the time to carefully study the metrics so your streams and content can be successful in the long run. Let’s break down how to view your metrics for each of the major social media platforms.
When on your homepage, if you click on your profile to bring up your account information, you should be able to see an Analytics tab. Once in the tab, you will be greeted with a plethora of information, including a month-by-month summary, showing total Tweets, Tweet Impressions, Mentions, and of course, Follower Count. Month by month, Twitter will show if you have gained or declined across the metrics, giving you a precise number for everything.
LinkedIn, while being a professional network, still allows you to publish posts and articles that can reach a wide audience. From the homepage, click on your profile icon, followed by Posts & Activity. Under each one of your posts and articles, you can view the number of people who viewed those posts and articles. Going one step further, if you click on this number, it can tell you the listed profession of those who viewed the post, allowing you to potentially tailor content to those professions.
To gain access to Instagram Insights, you’ll need to designate your account as a business account. If you don’t already have a business Instagram and think you’ll benefit from one, it’s very easy to set up. Once you’ve created your account, you need to go to your profile page, click on the three horizontal lines, click Settings, click Account, select ‘switch to business account’ and follow the prompts. Then you can view your Analytics in the same fashion, by going to your profile and tapping the three horizontal lines. This will show you metrics on your posts, stories, and audience demographics.
If you have a Page on Facebook, you can view your Insights at the top of said Page. It may be hidden within the ‘More’ section. Once data for over 100 people have been collected, you can view demographic data such as age, sex, and location, along with analytics for each post/article. It should be noted that if your Page is a ‘Community Page’ you won’t have access to Insights.
A very important metric to consider, aside from Follower Count and demographic information is what is dubbed your ‘Conversion Rate’. Basically, this is a measure of how many people are taking the desired action. It can be as simple as noting down your top posts that have got your followers or a wider audience talking (not in a bad way) and how many people are engaging with your created content through your social channels. If it’s low, there may be a problem with how your content is being presented or promoted on your channels, whether it’s the time of day when your demographic is active online, your language, or something else entirely. But noting and analyzing your best posts can help you repeat that success in the future.
Once you’ve studied your metrics and noted what’s popular and what isn’t popular on each platform (by inputting it in your spreadsheet or some form of document), you can take measured and purposeful strides to optimize each platform for maximum engagement. Like it was mentioned above, each social media platform has different draws, pros, and cons. A blanket approach across all of them will not work out as effectively as you may think.
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