by By Evan Spisla, Josie Ruff, Tylar Blansett, and Jason Jantz
Our week 6 kicked off quite differently from a normal class — with an extensive social media audit. This preparation for our final project showed us a real world example of an Oregon real estate company’s online presence. The company came to Kelli looking for help growing its Facebook presence. Getting ahold of a brand’s data is the first step to understanding its current social media presence. Without the data, you are spending way too much time doing guesswork. To be thorough in analysis, access to accounts and passwords is crucial.
Through the real estate company’s data, we were shown trends in Facebook reach and engagement that otherwise would not be apparent, like the disproportionately high “liking” in Rogue Valley compared to other geographic areas around the Willamette Valley area.
This page also had an interesting demographic reach, with an unusually high percentage of users over age 55. Kelli taught us this was an indicator of some type of past sponsored content for the Rogue Valley page.
We also defined the terms reach and engagement and were shown the relationship between them.
There was a strong emphasis on the idea that engagement is key — without consumers actively participating in the company’s social media activity, maintaining an online presence just is not worth it. Without an online presence in today’s world, companies can see a decrease in overall engagement over time.
Kelli also informed us on the best practices for doing our own audits:
- Review all posts and content
- Break posts up into topics
- Analyze each topic’s performance
- Use analysis to show which topics perform the best
- Increase top-performing topic posts
- Cease low-performing topic posts
We concluded class with some concrete next steps to recommend the organizations that we audit for, including:
- Be consistent
- Post successful content (shown in an audit)
- Set clear measurable objectives
- Develop a budget for management tools and sponsored content
- Become familiar with social media management options and tools
