According to HBS (Harvard Business School Publishing), social media audit is a systematic examination of social data to help marketers discover, categorise, and evaluate all the social talk about a brand. This approach captures what consumers are saying about a brand, what competitors are doing on social media, and what the brand itself is doing.

Here are a few steps to perform social media audit:

• Find out all profiles on social media channels – As a marketer, you need to find out lesser-known social media profiles to optimise them and make them popular. You should check as well as optimise business profiles on various networks like Google Plus, LinkedIn, Yelp, Tumblr, etc. For maximum impact, optimise business profiles on the top employment websites such as Indeed.com, etc.

• Record data - Record the platform of each business profile, its URL, total number of fans and followers, rate of engagement, communities your business has joined and other matrices. Of course, it will take time, but it will improve your overall understanding of your target market.

• Complete each profile – It is a time consuming task; however, it is important. Go through each profile and make sure that it is 100% complete. For better yields, add website’s URL, biography, picture, hours of operation, location, etc. It will also help websites to improve their rankings.

• Check for consistency – For businesses, it is important to consistently improve its brand image across the web, which can be achieved by sharing the same business profile, logo, ads across all social media profiles. Your businesses’ images, videos and graphics should relate to your company’s image. Make sure that your content is consistent and support your overall marketing strategy.

• Consider the market – Every platform is unique; so, create business profiles accordingly. It will help you to have a vibrant presence on the web. You also need to check the tone of customers to adjust yours.

• Set realistic goals - Once you have combed through your social media profiles for consistency, it’s time to go ahead to set realistic goals. Goals could be anything, from increasing the total number of followers, visitors, views, shares, comments to rate of engagement.  Remember – it is equally important to remove unnecessary and unauthorised profiles.

So, make your social media marketing strong and effective through social media audit.