Believe it or not, audits can be quite fun (gasp!) when they are conducted in the name of marketing. If you’re a fresh produce marketer investing in social media marketing efforts, it’s a good practice to perform a social media audit regularly on your social channels to provide a benchmark for success and identify opportunities for growth.

Take a look at these key metrics when you conduct your social media audit to help you strategically align your next fully integrated social media campaign:

Reach

Ideally, the more fans and followers you have the more your reach can potentially increase. We recommend focusing on increasing your reach vs. fans over time since this number can fluctuate downward even with a consistent increase in fans. Your reach tells you how many people see your content and spread your messages, so creating compelling content targeted toward your audience on a consistent basis will improve reach.

Referral Source Traffic

One goal that should be a priority when planning your social media content is generating traffic back to your website or blog. Your website referral sources will tell you how many visitors are coming from social media sites and the more the better. Keeping a close watch on this number through analytics programs and software will allow you to determine not only what types of posts on social media work to generate traffic for you, but will allow you to identify patterns in your reach and social media source traffic correlation.

Ad Conversion Rate

If you’re invested in social media, you have likely experimented with Facebook and Twitter advertising. These ads present brands with an opportunity to monumentally increase reach in a specified period of time. When you measure your ad’s effectiveness on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., the key number to pay attention to is the conversion rate. This number will tell you what percentage of the people who saw your ad actually “converted” or clicked on it to then become a fan or view your content. Data from Facebook suggests that consumer goods related ads convert on average at 58 percent, so a good conversion rate to aim for is between 40 and 60 percent.

The DMA Team recommends that you perform an in depth social media audit on a monthly basis, while also taking a look at these key metrics as often as weekly. Want to improve your numbers for your next audit by ensuring your social media promotions get maximum exposure? Download these social media promotion checklists to optimize your efficiency at planning social media content and save you valuable time executing fully integrated campaigns. Click the banner below to get the checklists now!