Back to the basics of social media!

Social media plays an important role for connection, communication and interaction between brands and customers, between peers and friends, especially, during times of crises such as the recent pandemic outbreak, where dependency on online media increases tremendously.

Over the last few years, there has also been a significant impetus on digital transformation where marketing and sales have gone digital. Social media, being one of the primary channels in digital marketing, becomes an integral part of the overall marketing landscape. As soon as businesses and brands realised this, most of them were quick to jump on the bandwagon getting on to social media. Currently with the online only scenario, even those companies who were not quite there yet have realised the power of social media and have begun leveraging the channel to their benefit.

To get your marketing efforts, yield results, no matter what channel you use, it is always important to get down to the basics.Moreover, these basics and fundamentals must be revisited and reviewed from time-to-time to see that everything is in order, as it is sometimes the most basic things, if not done right, might cause the biggest damage to ones efforts. Moreover, when things are moving slow, it is a good chance to rollback to the basics!

Talking about basics, from a social media marketing point-of-view, an important function would be - performing a social media audit. It is necessary for every social media marketer to perform this audit right at the beginning of their social media marketing venture. It is like one of those hygiene factors that may be routine but is necessary. Also, this must be revisited from time-to-time for keeping the channels up to date with the current updates of the brand and the industry. It would be a good idea to perform this audit in times such as these where things are generally slow, and business is not as usual. Listed below are a few fundamentally important checks to perform a thorough social media audit. Some of the points mentioned are generally not considered by marketers but they are essential

• Check the links and handles to see if they need to be updated to keep up with the trends
• Review the 'about' sections of all your social media platforms and update if necessary, with relevant and tending hashtags or keywords wherever possible
• Have a look at the profile and cover photos, and update, especially the cover photos to keep them relevant
• Perform checks if the platforms are linked directly from the website and there are no broken links or errors
• Assess whether theOpen Graph (OG) tags and Twitter cards are still relevant and accurate and take appropriate action
• Analyse and take necessary actions (following, blocking, removing) on followers and the accounts followed by the brand accounts
• See if the right influencer accounts are followed/liked
• Understand the audience for every platform used, especially checking for their relevance(demographics, interests, behaviour, etc.)
• Review the posts across the platforms to understand their tonality, frequency, type (video, images, link, texts) and performance w.r.t to essential KPIs such as likes, shares, followers increase/decrease, website traffic, conversions
• Keep a tab on the competitors' and leading industry experts’ accounts to get ideas for followers, influencers, post types, frequency, trends, and hashtags, and analyse their performance for comparison with yours
• Evaluate to see if another channel needs to be added to your social media marketing effort (forex: if Tik Tok needs to be ad)
• Make a note of relevant updates released by every social media channel from time-to-time and check for their relevance, effect on brand accounts and use to enhance performance
• Check if the right ORM measures are in place

Your brands' social media presence is decisive in creating the right impression among your customers, stakeholders, and influencers. Performing a good social media audit regularly will go a long way in building that impression.