How to Audit with William Crane

By: Danielle Horn, Deanna Borocz and Alysia Kezerian

In class on Tuesday, we all were able to hear from the wonderful William Crane, a skilled strategist, writer and editor with over 14 years of professional experience specifically in digital media, professional writing and journalism. Because of Crane’s expertise in creating and gathering information for audits, the conversation was valuable gaining knowledge about how to create audits for our own clients.

Social Media Audits: (n) Audits are a comprehensive examination of your clients owned, earned, paid and shared media.

With our final project just around the corner, Crane talked all about the what, how and why of social media audits. Having been assigned a client to create a social media audit for, lots of data and research can be very overwhelming and confusing. He gave us lots of insight on the value of what an audit can achieve and understanding what the client wants out of the metrics of their platforms.

“Have a kickoff call or kickoff meeting to start outlining with them,” Crane said.

Some clients struggle more than others on certain platforms, have trouble creating content or are confused about engagement on platforms like Facebook. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses about your client online can help give you a sense of what you need to dig through to help them understand how to connect with your client in future campaigns.

Crane also gave us lots of social listening tools to help us dive into the analytics for each of our clients. Sysomos is a great and easy tool to monitor social media “for the modern era.”

Crane advised us always try a demo or request for a free trial before committing to a social listening tool. They can be pricey and some have more features than others. Make sure you are able to capture and gather all the data you can before putting together a spreadsheet.

A couple of other tools that are both useful for clients and monitoring our own platforms include Iconosquare and Twitonomy to measure our statistics.

While conducting social media audits, make a competitive analysis of owned properties, social platforms, paid media and earned media. This is important since engagement is critical when creating audits. Break up your content into topics or buckets. Clients are looking to you for guidance and expertise when searching for data. In addition, look for spikes in your data. It can tell a story making future steps more valuable during research.

What were some important aspects of Crane’s guest lecture that you will use in your final projects?

See the some of the conversation here.