Springtime Social Media Audit

7 Spring Cleaning Tips

OK, let’s get real: “social media audit” sounds exactly like a project that social media managers really don’t want to do. But Spring has sprung, and with this time of renewal and rejuvenation it’s a great time to revisit the nuts, bolts and other such connective parts of the social media machine that you brave social media marketers have constructed around your brand.

So, rather than “social media audit,” let’s call this process something a wee bit more fun, like:

7 Easy Steps to Social Media Spring Cleaning

That sounds better, doesn’t it? We’ve tried to make your social media audit as painless as possible. Hey, we like you.

Audit permissions on all your social media sites

When was the last time you took a look at who had access to manage your Facebook Page, Twitter feed, or third-party app that posts across sites? The reality is that a lot of us use multiple sites, tools and logins — and this makes the permissions piece an organic one, as employees leave companies and change roles. Go ahead and log into everything and make sure that your permissions are in-line with your current employee job descriptions.

Refresh your look and feel

Has it been more than a year since you changed out your Twitter background or Facebook banner? If so, it’s time for a refresh: no social media audit is complete without a design refresh. The good news is that you probably want a refresh anyway, due to the need to…

Revisit your positioning

Take a look at what your social media profiles are telling the world about your company. What’s the brand story? It’s possible that your corporate positioning has changed since last year, and your social media profiles aren’t up to date.

Take a deep dive into your success metrics

Q2 is a really great time to look at metrics: theoretically your annual goals are set (and if not, you’re not alone: I once worked for a company that got our annual marketing plan together in May), and you still have 2+ quarters left to hit them. Summer is an off time for a lot of industry topline revenue, so Spring is a good time to plan for that by making sure that your KPI’s are sound, and that they’re still relevant given any positioning or other changes coming up that might affect them. If you haven’t yet set your goals or are having trouble figuring out what success looks like, check out our social media ROI article.

Get organized with lists

Ooh, lists! Who doesn’t love a good list? Facebook has interest lists, Twitter enables influencer lists, G+ has circles and YouTube has playlists. If you’re not using these, now’s a great time to start. If you are, now’s a great time to revisit them and make sure that they’re cleaned up and full of the people and content you want.

Optimize your profiles

YouTube, Pinterest and SlideShare can be really powerful for SEO. Part of your social media audit should be revisiting your company’s SEO strategy to make sure that you’re optimizing for the terms most important to your business goals. If you haven’t experimented yet with anything beyond Facebook and Twitter, consider trying out something like Pinterest or SlideShare.

Change all your passwords

With so many logins, it’s easy to let those password changes go by the wayside. Yes, password changes are a pain — but even before Heartbleed, changing our passwords quarterly was actually the rule of thumb. If it’s been 3+ months since you’ve changed the passwords to your social media profiles and associated sites (stock photo imagery, for example), now’s a great time to go ahead and make those changes. This becomes a lot less painful if you’re using a social media marketing tool that allows multiple uses, as — rather than changing all those passwords and then having to email them out to everyone and keeping track of who has them — you can simply adjust the main account and invisibly make that change.

So, there you have it: your annual social media audit, packaged together in 7 Spring Cleaning steps. If you have any other tips, tweet at me.

This article originally published on the Meltwater social media blog.