Social Media CRO Audit: How to Do a Successful Audit, Step-by-Step

Note: This post is a part of our CRO Month 2019. Share it with the #Optimizein28Days to promote optimization awareness and how CRO can help businesses thrive.

Social media is a powerful tool for branding and marketing.

As the rest of the world is bound to tell you, it’s one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience, and a large mass of human beings lurking in the internet. No wonder knowing how to do a successful social media CRO audit is important.

It’s cost-effective, free (most of the time), very interactive, and more.

So they say…

• 95% of online adults aging from 18-34 years old are most likely to follow a brand via social networking (MarketingSherpa).
• 50 million small businesses use Facebook Pages to connect with their customers (Facebook).
• 78% of people complaining to a brand on Twitter expect responses within the hour (Lithium).
• Top brands on Instagram see a follower engagement rate of 4.21% — higher than both Facebook and Twitter (Hootsuite).
• 9% of small businesses are on YouTube (Omnicore).
• People are now watching 150 million hours of YouTube every day (Omnicore).
• LinkedIn is the #1 channel B2B marketers use to distribute content at 94%.
• There are over 26 million companies and 15 million active job listings on LinkedIn (LinkedIn).

But let’s all be honest when we say that social media marketing isn’t turning out the way we want it to. And more often than not, it falls a bit short of our expectations.

You may have done everything needed to acquire followers and people reading your content on social media, but after much work, you may have found it didn’t generate as many leads or traffic as you have expected.

Well, it’s time to stop worrying about what’s wrong with people. It’s merely time to learn how to do a successful social media CRO audit.

Step 1: Know your Demographics

Knowing who your demographics are lets you uncover who your audience is. But keep in mind that your audience varies depending on the social platform they use.

Take a closer look at the people within your social community and ask some questions, like:

• Which industry do they belong to?
• What’s their gender?
• How old are they? What’s your age range?
• Where are they from?
• Do they have any shared interests?

Easily the most popular tool you can use to answer these questions is Google Analytics — underneath the Audience tab. It also helps to know that each social media platform also has their own method of audience analytics.

Invest an ample amount of time collecting as much specific data as you can find in the demographics report. Follow it up by comparing your audiences on each site.

The data you find will help you construct your ideal customer profile.

Create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Ideal Customer Profile — a singular term. The more specific an ICP is, the better you’ll be able to tailor your content, your page copy, and a unique as well as a fulfilling memorable experience for a very specific user.

An ICP will be one of your guiding pillars in which you will base your customer service and CRO decisions. However, regardless of the final goal, it’s important to have a specific end-user in mind as you choose what to test or change on the page.

Check your Messaging, and Match it with your Current Traffic

After identifying correctly who it is you’re looking for and aiming to attract, we can now begin combing through your social media account to start on the actual social media CRO audit. And one of the first things to address is a message match.

Just think about the number of times you felt frustrated when a title deceived you into thinking it was what you were looking for. Indirectly speaking, it’s best to say ‘no’ to clickbait — especially when you’re targeting other businesses. Remember that in B2B, your audience is not just anybody.

Keep in mind that when people click on links you attach to your social media posts, they are after a specific experience. Whether it’s finding a free downloadable lightweight program, watching an educational tutorial video, or purchasing a product for a great deal, this is what is commonly referred to as user intent.

And whatever the original user intent was when they were drawn to clicking on your link, make sure the landing page messaging matches this intent. Make it as clear as possible right up front in the headline, and the in the landing page itself.

Step 2: Time your Posts

Your posting schedule can determine your social media success, and it doesn’t help that this aspect of social media marketing is tricky…

Post sparingly and your audience will forget your existence entirely. On the other hand, if you post too frequently, it won’t be long before your audience sees your published content as a nuisance. Not only will they dread your content showing up on their feed. They will find ways to rid themselves of you too.

And no business wants that. So how do you appropriately strike a balance?

Pieces of advice on how to time your posts on social media are all over the internet. The world’s biggest digital marketing experts have provided valuable output on scheduling your posts effectively.

But even then, it’s still crucial that you as the marketer know what to analyze, where to look for this data, and how to use it accordingly.

To rightly determine the best time to post on social media for your audience, take the time to observe, and see:

• What types of posts get the most attention from your audience?
• When your target audience reacts to your posts.
• Which days of the week.

Take note that your audience’s reactions and responses vary depending on the social media platform you’re using.

You can also make use of several publishing tools to accomplish this purpose. Tools like, HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Google Analytics — to a name a few.

Step 3: Monitor your Social Media Posts

A typical day of executing your social media campaigns correctly include promoting your brand both overtly and covertly. It involves constantly donning an online persona that speaks in behalf of the brand, and illustrating your services and products in the most creative manner possible.

There’s a lot to balance in the universe that is social media. And you shouldn’t have to do it all alone. Tools are around for a reason, and they’re meant to help you.

There are many social media monitoring tools out there, and your task is to find one that effectively analyzes and optimizes your social media performance and activity. They all have their fair share of pros and cons, and that’s why it’s up to you to test them out and see what works best.

Social media tools you can use include:

• Facebook Insights: Facebook’s official metrics for monitoring your business on the platform.
• Twitter Analytics: Twitter’s own analytics that lets you measure your level of engagement, and getting to know your followers by exploring demographics, interests, and their location.
• LinkedIn Analytics: Provides views on metrics and trends related to your company’s LinkedIn page.
• Instagram Insights: Monitors your progress on your Instagram Business account; a tool offered by the platform itself.
• Union Metrics: Keeps tabs on Twitter and Instagram.
• SumAll: Analytics tool that combines social media, sales metrics, web traffic, etc.
• Followerwonk: Exclusive for Twitter monitoring.
• Likealyzer: It’s also known as your “personal Facebook advisor.” And its exclusive to that one social network only.
• Socialbakers: Track your competitors’ actions and statistics along with your own.
• RivalIQ: This tool is also geared towards competitive analysis. It lets you see the size of your competitors’ audience, posting frequency, and other social signals.
• Klear: Tool that covers influencer marketing, competition espionage, and social media monitoring.
• SEMrush Social Media Tool: Focuses on both competitor analysis and monitoring your own social media campaigns on Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

Step 4: Check Success of your Content Creation

In the first two steps of learning how to do a successful social media CRO audit, the majority of your attention is focused solely on your audience. You get to know them, you’re figuring out the best times of the day to put your content on social media out there, and you made use of tools to monitor your social media campaigns.

But in the process of tracking your success, it’s time to pay attention to your social media post statistics.

Check your analytics and find your post’s engagement, length of reach, and its level of popularity among your target audience.

Also, throughout the process, you should work on finding similarities in all of your best performing content.

• Are there specific posts that cover topics where you produced the most likes and comments?
• What was the tone of those posts? Were they humorous or motivational or just really entertaining?
• Did you ask for engagement in those posts?
• Were you able to respond to questions and comments on each site? Was your response timely or tardy?
• What type of content was it? Was it a blog post, a promotional image or video, an update, a casual post just for fun? Which one of them performed the best?
• How many people are clicking through your social media content to reach your landing page?
• And when people make it to your landing page, how much of them actually convert?

Step 5: Improving Content in Response to the Audit

After running a complete social media CRO audit, it’s now time to put the results into action. The end result of an audit is you knowing what kind of content your followers prefer to interact with.

Highly likely, the conclusion of your social media CRO audit can lead to:

• Creating a new ad.
• Crafting more effective and compelling calls to action.
• Knowing which type of content is most effective.
• Writing better blog and social media posts.

Step 6: Optimizing Posts for Social Media Conversions

We would be lying if we said we haven’t experienced our fair share of troubles in the process that is social media marketing. At some point, every digital marketer struggles with Facebook and Twitter engagement or the number of Instagram followers.

Social media is powerful for branding, and conversions made through social platforms are deemed as signs of success for marketers.

Building an audience of thousands is a dream come true, and it’s wonderful.

But does your brand exercise the ability to influence your audience into taking action? This is one of the challenges that many marketers face, especially if you’re looking to prove that ROI in social media campaigns do happen.

Keep it Brief and Entertaining

Your target audience doesn’t shop for goodies on social media. They are scrolling their feeds in search of continuous entertainment — whether its cheeky posts, or interesting photos or videos. Your audience is on social media in a passive bid to know what’s going on in the world.

For this reason, it makes sense that they would leave if your links direct them to a 2000 word sales page or a thirty-minute video about your company’s technical expertise.

So, instead of leading your audiences to landing pages that would dump a bunch of information on their heads, you should think in terms of acquiring leads — not sales.

Split Testing on Social Media Posts

You’re excited about conversions happening on your newest landing pages, but before you worry about conversions, you need to think about how you’re going to lead these people to your actual page. And the basic principle of increasing online visibility is none other than optimization.

Your posts on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. has to be compelling enough to earn a click.

And you determine this through split testing. It may take some time, but the results you can gather are well-worth it. Create variations of the same social media posts. Try different images for each caption and vice versa, or test out a set of CTAs.

Asking for Engagement

Visibility is the key to a chance for social media conversion. However, acquiring organic traffic is difficult enough without a Facebook Ad or other forms of paid social media visibility. But you can easily amplify your reach by asking your audience for engagement.

It’s as simple as asking people to share your posts, like your videos, subscribe to your content, or encouraging your followers to tell their friends about your services.

Try adding words like “tag a friend” to the end of your social media posts. And to take it even further, add social sharing buttons on your landing page.

Because as more people begin sharing your posts, it leads to a domino effect. More people will see, and they will feel compelled to share. That means more traffic, and larger chances of conversion.

Strategy is King in Social Media

The landscape of social media can be likened to a sport. It’s competitive, and it takes a lot of team effort. For so many reasons, your success on social media is determined by strategy. By learning how to do a successful social media CRO audit, you can formulate a strategy that will help you in your social media content creation.

• Do an inventory of all your channels. Note the active and the stagnant ones.
• Search for your abandoned social media accounts (if there are any).
• Merge multiple accounts to prevent content duplication.

After doing your social media audit and tracking your progress, it’s time to take a look at your current social media channels and reassess each of their strengths while looking at what kind of content should be appropriately shared on each channel.

Entertaining Copy

Writing on social media has been made even easier through tools that let you post the same content across multiple social media platforms. There is an advantage in posting identical messages across each network, but a downside to this technique exists as well.

For one, different channels have different audiences. Each of them is used most at a specific time of day, and they have their own character limits. It goes without saying that different social media platforms call for different styles of writing.

Take a minute to assess your audience composition for each social network your move around in. Look at that and see how it compares to the usership data from your own analytical tools. From there, you can find ways to reshape content from one channel to another to draw attention and attract organic web traffic.

Better-quality Photos and Videos

Visuals are a huge part of social media marketing. They are more than 40x more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. It’s no wonder why 71% of online marketers make use of visuals in their social media marketing.

Remember that text is only part of the equation to attaining an engaging social media post. Without the appropriate visuals, there’s a chance that people will simply scroll right past your content. Think about it. There are millions of daily active users on social media. You have to find a way for your content to rise above the noise.

Here are some of the best practices for using images to boost your social media conversion rate:

• Create network-specific visuals: Rather than just using images that social media platforms pull out of your website, try creating an image that serves the purpose of driving social media conversions. Custom graphics having lively colors and a compelling CTA is much more engaging than the photos you pull out of free stock.
• Don’t overload on text: Infographics are good, but too much text will kill its purpose.

Demonstrate Social Proof

It may sound a tad unfair for those looking to have a shot at fame, but which post are you more likely to retweet or reshare? Highly likely, it’s the one with the most engagement — the most likes, the most reacts, the most retweets, the most comments.

Research from Bright Local revealed that consumers read an average of 7 reviews before trusting a business. And 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Stats like these provide enough proof that we, human beings, are more inclined to trust our peers more than any business’ exclamations. Basically, we care about what other people think.

In the words of Sprout Social’s Dominique Jackson, “Social proof is when people make decisions based on how popular something is on social media.”

A video or a blog post with thousands and thousands of social media shares and engagement is seen as more trustworthy for one of the sole reasons that so many people have shared it. And you, as the viewer, may also be tempted to follow the crowd and share it too after seeing what the content has to offer.

So, the easy trick here is that when you have enough shares and engagement on your social media content, it’s recommended to pin that to the top of your feed so more people see it easily. Shares increase, more people react and leave comments, and your content gains more popularity.

Social Media CRO Audit: Was It Successful?

They say that there is no way of finding a solution to a problem if you haven’t recognized that there is one.

That applies to all things; including your social media marketing strategies. No matter how sleek or smooth they may be, you’re bound to run into bumps in the round here and there. It’s the natural course of life.

Conversion rate optimization auditing is a need everybody must acknowledge and address. In doing so, you gain an insight to how your campaigns in social media are truly doing. And through CRO auditing, you are better able to identify your own lapses and rectify those shortcomings.

In learning how to do a successful social media CRO audit, it is important to:

• Understand your target audience by creating an ICP and checking your messaging and traffic alignment.
• Time your posts according to your audience’s convenience.
• Monitor your social media posts’ progress through a variety of social media auditing tools.
• Check and gauge the success of your content creation on social media.
• Improve your output in response to the audit’s results.
• Optimize your posts for social media conversions all over again.

And the cycle continues and goes on and on, until one day, you find yourself standing at the very top of your own social media empire.