You Ask, I Answer: What Belongs in a Social Media Audit?

In today's episode, Summer asks, what do you include in a social media audit for a client? This is an excellent question because there are some tips and tricks to help you do this much more easily. And the number one thing you have to do before you do anything else, before you start planning uh any data polls or charts or visualizations, is to understand whether or not social media had any business impact. You have to make that determination first. If social media had no business impact, guess what?

You don't need to do the rest of the audit because it doesn't matter. If it does have business impact, then you want to sort of drill down and understand what are what in specific within social media is having impact. Now there's three different ways to make this determination. The first, and probably the simplest for most people, is going to be within Google Analytics. If you go into your Google Analytics, you go to conversions, go to multi-channel funnels, go to assisted conversions.

If your channel groupings, your default channel groupings are set up properly, uh this will be an accurate report that will tell you the impact of social media. That said, most of the time most people's Google Analytics are not set up correctly for default channel groupings. A lot of the time social media gets lumped into referral rather than social because of the nature of the way so people do their tagging and the tools that they use and the very, very non standard way people tend to tag their social media links with the UTM tracking codes. They'll put all sorts of random stuff in those fields and not use the approved conventions by Google to tell Google Analytics, hey, this is social traffic. Quick tip on that front.

Your UTM medium code, if you're doing social media, should be social. Just keep it simple. Keep it social for any UTM tracking codes on social media, and then things will be attributed properly within the default channel groupings. So let's take a look here. This is my website.

This is all of 2019, looking back at the year, and we see for assisted conversions, last touch conversions, last click uh value. Let's sort my last click value first just to see uh what impact social had. Social was responsible for me for about 460 of last touch conversion, and then an additional 45 dollars of assisted conversion. So this to me says, okay, I think I have some value here in social media. Let's switch this to source medium just to see uh just to get a sense of uh what those things might be.

And we see here this is important. Look, T.co, Twitter links are coming in as referrals. They're that's not set up uh in here correctly for attributing t.co links. Um this is something that I should probably fix in my own analytics. We see 226 dollars came from Twitter.

Okay, so in my social media audit, I should probably spend a decent amount of time on Twitter if I'm getting good economic value from that's the number five source. Ignore direct none because direct none means Google doesn't know what uh happened there. LinkedIn, $73 and uh six dollars worth of uh revenue there. Now, this is from my e-commerce side. Um and let's see, yeah.

So that's that's it for the top ten sources here. So, should my social media audit contain uh extensive charts and graphs about Facebook? No. There's no Facebook here. Facebook is uh completely absent from the top ten revenue generating sources.

And we can see with about $7,000 worth uh if I actually flip this to pie chart mode here, we can see that uh everything else in the other outside of the top ten is only 10% of all revenue. So by far, uh we have organic search, is it responsible for the lion's share here, followed by uh my email newsletter, and then then Twitter is my number three uh source for assisted conversions. If we flip this to last conversions, uh value. Here we have Google Organic Direct Company website, email newsletter, Twitter number five. So this is what when you do a social media audit, this is what the starting point is to say this is the economic value, the business impact.

And even if you don't have e-commerce set up or you're not an e-commerce company, you could still use things like the total number of conversions, either direct uh or last touch, to illustrate, yes, social media is having business impact. Now, if you want to get more advanced, you have to start to leave Google Analytics behind and use more sophisticated uh tracking tools. This is an example of one using a machine learning technique called Markov Chains, uh, which uh is sort of like um imagine basketball players playing basketball. Uh there's always that person who scores the basket, but you gotta check out the passing game or the people who are around that person to get the ball to that person so that they can score the baskets. That's sort of what this chart looks at.

It looks at who scores the most baskets, but then it also looks at how do the the different channels interact with each other in terms of placement. Here again, we see Twitter, about five percent of conversions impact. It's uh in line with what we saw in inside of Google Analytics, but we can see that Twitter is sort of at the end of uh the engagement customer journey. We see actually, no, I'm sorry, it's it's within the conversion, so it really is a less such channel. So it was email.

So though that tells me from a social media audit perspective, I should be looking at my messaging on Twitter to validate that uh it is the language I'm using is sort of the closing language rather than introductory language. People apparently know who I am on Twitter because they're buying stuff from it. Whereas organic search, when when people come to my website through organic search, I would want to check the messaging of the top searched pages to make sure there's introductory stuff so that they know, oh, this is who this person is. And again, we see Facebook is in there, tiny little dots and things. So from the perspective of what to include, I would start with that strong foundation of this is the business impact of any given social media channel, and then build upwards from that to say, okay, so if we know Twitter's the thing when it comes to social media, what things on Twitter worked best?

Do more of those, what things on Twitter didn't work, and then do comparative analysis to say, okay, what do our competitors doing on Twitter that's working well for them? And uh should we do similar ideas as those competitors in order to uh try and engage our audiences more. So that's what I think belongs in a social media audit. Keep your audits light. Um, I know, and and I'm guilty of this, uh, as well, of throwing everything in the kitchen sink in an audit.

But at the end of the day, like any form of analysis, you want people to make decisions. What decisions are you looking for somebody to make? If I'm doing an audit of my own website here, the decision is which social network should I not spend time on? Huh? Facebook, right?

I should clearly not be spending any time uh on unpaid Facebook because it's just not delivering any results. I should be spending to the extent that I can time on Twitter and then maybe experimenting on some some uh smaller platforms like Reddit, etc. to see if I can get some juice out of those. But any audit should be uh very, very lightweight to keep it to the decisions that you want somebody to make in order to grow to create that growth. Um the the general format I I recommend for uh any kind of report is strategy, tactics, uh execution, you know, sort of next steps and then timeline.

Um we call it the Saint Strategy uh summary, analytics, insights, next steps, timeline. And that's sort of what is goes in a a really good audit is the quick summary, the analysis of what happened, the insights as to why those things happened, why is Twitter better than Facebook? What are the next steps? Do more Twitter, and then what's the time frame? Do more Twitter right now and just stop messing around with Facebook.

Uh stop trying to make Facebook work. It's just it's just not. That way you summarize for people this is what it is that you need to do. And that's what makes a good audit. So great question, important question, because a lot of people will be doing year-end wrap-ups uh around this time of year as I record this.

Uh a lot of people do quarterly wrap-ups, monthly wrap-ups, and you always want to have it be that very concise. Here's what we need to do, here's the decisions and the approvals I need from you, report reader. Um let's go ahead and either make those decisions or continue on the way we are. Uh as always, please leave your comments in the comments box below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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