Making the most of your social media investments

Every business today knows the value and importance of social media, whether they’re an e-commerce business catering to customers across the world or a simple garage servicing vintage cars in Long Island, New York. Hence, they’ve started investing resources into creating good content and promoting it on social media.

However, is it easy to define good content? And if it isn’t, then how can they really know if what they’re spending on is a good investment of their resources? What is it that companies must do if they really want to understand the value they’ve been creating – from the customer’s perspective?

Well, the answer is to conduct a social media audit. Whether the business decides to engage outside help, create a cross-functional team of from within, or just get its social media guys to “re-think” the model, an audit can bring tremendous value and provide excellent insights.

How social media audits help businesses

Honestly, social media audits all do just one thing – fill in the gaps. Businesses and business managers can learn about what’s working and doing well versus what’s struggling to get through to your audience, make appropriate changes, and therefore, gain an understanding of how to maximize resources spent on digital marketing.

To simplify things, here are some goals that a social media audit can help you meet:

Maximize your social media spend

When you invest in a social media audit, your business is able to maximize its social spend because it understands what kind of content does well with the audience, when posts should be promoted, and how the target audience should be defined.

So, say you’re a mid-sized stainless steel coil spring manufacturer with your production facility located in Niles, Illinois. Understanding your audience and catering to their needs means you’ll probably create more B2B posts and use business platforms such as LinkedIn and Google+ more often Facebook and Twitter.

As a result of your focus on business, you’ll probably talk about things that are more serious such as the price of raw materials, corrosion or resistance to corrosion thereof, import and export figures, trade relations with neighboring countries, and thoughts and benefits of procuring the product from (your facility in) Illinois.

Uncover new lead-generation opportunities

When you audit your social media profiles, you’ll probably learn about the audience that you expect to cater to. And those insights will help you better tailor your content to them.

However, your audit might also reveal interest from other demographics that you didn’t think would be interested – in your content or your product.

The Illinois-based coil spring manufacturer, for example, might think of North America as his target market, but traffic from Europe or South America might indicate interest in those markets.

Drilling into the specifics of where the traffic was originated, what it looked at, how it came to the content, how that particular audience engaged with your posts, etc could reveal exciting opportunities. Maybe even incentivize additional spending on localized content targeted towards that specific audience group/category.

Benchmark against your competitors

Well, it’s great to “run your own race” and constantly strive to improve – but the reality is, in the digital world, businesses compete for customers who see, know, and have access to “everything”.

In order to get their attention, and motivate them to stay loyal to the business, it’s important to benchmark against your competitors.

Evaluate who your competitors are and understand what they’re doing that’s getting better results if you can, and how you may improve.

An important point here is that businesses must make sure that you benchmark against the biggest players in the market, not their peers – because, on social media, you’re competing on firm footing, for attention and a share of your customer’s wallet.

Consider the social media audit successful if you find ways and means to give the big guys some tough competition.