Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
Today, we're talking about auditing your social media. What is it? How can you audit it and how often should you audit it?
Well, first of all, a social media audit is when you're checking where you're starting from or where you are at the moment. So first of all, you go through each platform that you have your business on and you check to make sure they have all the same name or the same branding and all the same message, then you benchmark and monitor. So there is another platform that we also look at Esther, when you're probably a bit more accustomed to than myself.
Oh, yes. Your beloved website, the most important part of your marketing in most people's opinion, including mine, not the only opinion that matters.
What yours?
Yeah.
Hearing it for the first time here.ok, we know, quite seriously, yes, the website is really important and is part of your social media audit, although it's not deemed as a practical social media platform,
No, it's not nobody turns around and says yet find me on my social media platform, as in www.mywebsite.com. You know, they would figure out that social media is more Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Some people even have a hard time saying YouTube is social media. But it is.
Oh, absolutely. And by having a particular presence on the right platforms and making sure that you're not on the platforms, you don't need to be on anymore or the ones that aren't working for you, you might need to be on it, but it's not particularly working for you. I mean, when people think social media audit or even social media in general, a lot of people think you have to be on every platform. You have to have a presence on everyone. But I wouldn't need to be on Tick-Tock, for instance. My audience wouldn't be there.
No, but there are people who do say at least have the URL, at least have.
Yeah.
Claim that so that nobody else can go on and impersonate you, which is a valid point. But at the end of the day, if you're not going to use it, do you know it's actually going to hurt your business at the end of the day.
I'm trying to envisage somebody impersonating me on Tick-Tock.
Anybody want a challenge?
Don't give them the idea! Crikey. Anyway, so she's gone. So now we're doing the social media audit formally. So this is something we go to our audience about. So they instruct us to help them and we do a social media audit of their business. And part of the social media audit would be going through the URLS and making sure they all say the same name. Now, sometimes it's difficult to claim the URL with a website address or the social media address for that.
It's not always possible.
No, so you have to get something close to it or something still means the same thing. So it could be Stump Island, let's say, because I'm stumped, i.e. so. And then once you've claimed all the URLS, like you said, do you then go on to optimize the platform, so how would you optimize, say, Facebook and Twitter?
Well, Facebook you would make sure that you have the digital att, the username. OK, so Facebook, when you first set up your Facebook page and even months later, I've seen people are years later, I've seen people who haven't claimed their URL. So it comes up, for example, Facebook.com/theMondaymorningmarketing/a whole bunch of numbers and letters and trying to share that with people is a nightmare. So what you want to do is you want to get your little att sign and you want to put in the social media marketing or Monday morning marketing. In this example, you want to put in what your business name is into that. As close as you can, now sometimes, especially with that att and with Twitter as well, you're limited to the number of characters that you can use.
Yeah.
So for Twitter, we weren't able to put in the Monday morning marketing podcast, you know, it was far too long. So that's why on Twitter we are att marketing.com, So that's linked into our website and LinkedIn with our name and everything. Because it's got a limited number of characters, you have to be a little bit more creative. If your business is a really long name, if you have to see, if your business is your personal name and you have the same name as somebody else, you may need to think about putting in a dot or an underscore or one or two numbers at the end or changing out a couple of letters for numbers, you know, like a three for an E or four for an A or something like that. Be a little bit creative, but don't go overboard because then you have to remember it at the end of the day what it is.
Yeah. And it has to be memorable to others as well. If it's meaningless numbers and letters, it holds no relevance to people.
Yeah, and a lot of people would consider the accounts with numbers and letters spam, you know, if it's all just, you know, Melanie Boylen, one, two, three, four, five people are going to really?
So you say me, not you.
No, I'm unique. Try finding another Esther Ocampo in the world. I dare you.
I see please don't look up another Melanie Boylen, it's not good, that what everybody's going to check now, huh?
Yeah, we really are.
So the other thing we need to do is also look at updating our about section is an area that unfortunately does tend to get a little neglected over time. So keep in running your business for a little while. I know you've probably changed your address or your services, that sort of thing, but have you upscaled also as a training, you know, has your message slightly changed about your business? So as part of a social media audit, I would recommend everybody go through their about section or their bios on each platform just to make sure it's still relevant and still current.
Yeah, especially on Facebook.
Exactly
Because has given us extra space recently. When I say recently, it could be in the last year, OK, the last six months have been a bit of a blur as to what day we're actually on at the minute, but they've given us extra space to write your story. So use that because that also comes up well in social search engine optimization and search engines. And if people are looking for a digital marketer and social media manager, have that in our case, we would have that in our stories. If they're looking for your business, will you come up?
Especially now, Facebook have added hashtags as a search engine, optimization, possibility. So now you've got to start incorporating hashtags in your posts on Facebook.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. But if it helps with this, I'm for it.
Well. You just described what you've previously said in the last sentence.
"Laughs" But I don't like it's not something that would come naturally to me to use on Facebook. That's what I mean. OK, it's going to be a whole Switch the whole thing, but we're not talking about that right now.
Well, it is a whole new world.
Well, I know, as we step out into our new normal "Laughs"
OK, so there's one other thing we need to check as well. So we've checked URLs. We've checked their about, we've optimized our platforms to make sure our images are the right sizes. With fresh and the map, you can put up seasonal images if you wants, some new special offer or new location, something along those lines. But there's another area that you need to check, certainly a lot more often than a lot of people do. And that is your analytics and seeing what your audience is liking, because, again, a lot of businesses, without even realizing it, are actually quite seasonal. And so if you can have a look and see what's worked for you over the last week, the last months, the last few months, if it's been a while and see what the audience is actually responding to, a lot of your analytics will go back that far. And we also wanted to mention about lead magnets as well.
Yeah, I think we'll come up to that in another episode, possibly next week. Stay tuned for that one. But just before we log off, because we're getting to the end of our time, don't neglect LinkedIn, OK? Your LinkedIn URL, especially if you're you know, it's usually going to be your personal name, first off. And then you go in and get your business page. But if you have your name on it and then a bunch of numbers after it, it's the same ideas of what's on Facebook, you know. So go in there is it's really simple, really easy way to go into LinkedIn and get my platform so confused. No, it's too early in the morning. We go in and change it to have, just the name OK.
If you can.
Yeah, obviously if you can, if there's other people again, look for whatever they allow you underscores, dots, one simple number. OK, so but claim your name. That's the moral. And if you have images for example, that are no longer useful, I'm thinking Google My Business at the minute, which you talked about a couple of weeks ago. If you have images there that are no longer relevant to your business, remove them.
Especially if you rebranded, because it gets confusing when people are looking you up and you've got a new name.
Yeah, exactly. So like I said, we'll talk about magnets, hopefully next week. But if not, stay tuned for another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. It's been great as always, Melanie.
Yeah. Don't forget to send us messages, guys. We love getting your messages. And can we keep them clean because we'd like to read them out occasionally.
"Laughs" please.
And also make sure you can find us on all the different social platforms. We're on all of them now. We've had a chat about Google My Business and realized we didn't have one. So we're on there now and we've got lots of great Google reviews. So if you like us, please give us a review.
It's been great. Thanks very much, everybody. Good bye.