Tracking Your Business Goals with Your Annual Social Media Audit
Social Media Mental Health
December 19, 2019
How You Can Leverage Your Personal Facebook Account for Business
January 21, 2020
Hooray to another rotation around the Sun. It’s been a wonderful journey. As another year rolls out, I am spending some time evaluating my clients’ work. Annual social media audits is something I find necessary to track my clients’ social media progress. If this is something you haven’t been doing yet, this will be a useful read.
I love both a bird’s eye view and teeny tiny details when it comes to reporting. Call me a nerd but I enjoy watching figures change illustrating work progress and other metamorphosis. However, Facebook analytics can be a rabbit hole without a bottom or an exit. It’s important to identify what data matters to your specific goals so you can keep your finger on the pulse … of the right body.
Many entrepreneurs struggle to make sense of their social media results because they don’t know what they mean to them, often because they have nothing to compare them against. Without knowing your benchmark it’s impossible to know where to go next, what will work for you and what are the social media numbers to pay attention to.
This is why so many people compare their work with what everyone else is doing, of course, without any access to their data. As a result, many are seeing surface data (that isn’t relevant to them) and compare it with their own efforts, making a huge error in their judgment.
You must know your OWN benchmark and your OWN data and never compare your work to anyone else.
I talked about how to do your own initial social media audit earlier – you can find it here:
Keep the records of your results (in the form that makes sense to you!) and evaluate them regularly. Without watching and understanding your data, it’s difficult to know what to focus on in your social media marketing work.
If social media audit is something you started your 2019 with, now is the perfect time to go back and look at your past 12 months of results. Facebook audit is a very detailed document allowing you to see how your efforts are translating into getting closer to your goal.
I encourage you to only look at the data that matters to your work to avoid getting overwhelmed by all the things you can look at on Facebook. For example, year-by-year growth, Page’s engagement, posts viral-ness and video views are some of the higher level data segments we have been keeping the track of for the last 2 years with one of my clients, identifying the overall projection of the brand (see the table below).
This can give you a great bird’s eye view of what’s happening with your social media today, understanding how it is contributing to your business.
In my example above, I was able to have a conversation with my client illustrating how the strategic content roadmap we’ve been following affected their overall performance with their Page’s average engagement more than doubling in the last two years. This bit of data is important to my client as we are now leveraging organic sales from the improved engagement, which was one of the goals of our work together starting from December 2017.
The improved engagement is a step in the sequence of getting to the desired goal.
We rarely leap to our goals but rather take steps towards them. Social media can help you identify the steps required for your success.
The initial social media audit will help you set a benchamrk so that when you come back 12 months later you can see how your efforts are moving you towards your goals.
If you didn’t do your social media audit last year, you can take up this opportubit any time – before you start a new campaign – this will help you understand the impact of your effort, moving you quicker and closer to your goal.
P.S. Whenever you are ready… here how I can help you leverage social media technology to really power your mission:
I design simple and effective social media and Facebook ads strategies helping gifted not for profits and businesses for purpose leverage their social media technology and loyal community to really power their mission, building more donations and creating impact. My work is custom solution aiming at the specific needs of your work.
There are many ways you can reach out to see if I am a good fit for your goals. Check out the Facebook Messanger bubble on the bottom right, contact page on the top and/or a form and a calendar, if this type of communication suits you better.
I look forward to supporting your vision of the future!
