How To Do A Social Media Audit For Bloggers

It is always hard to tell which of your social media networks are helping your business. Because they cost so much in time and attention, it is important to note which ones work to grow your blog and which ones are just wasting time.

This is a social media audit where we review our marketing goals, our traffic, and strategy for getting better returns from our efforts. Includes my best tips and ideas for tracking social media results.

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Just so you know, along the way of doing this I found out one site I have almost 20K followers sent me 108 hits all year…. yes, you read that right 108 ALL YEAR!!! It is so worth taking the time to do some auditing your socials.

A Self Fulfilling Prophecy!

Before we go too far, let’s address the elephant in the room. If you aren’t getting good results from Instagram, you may not be posting enough. If you aren’t getting good results from LinkedIn, it might be that your content isn’t a good fit for the business-like atmosphere over there. 

If everything was black and white it would be much easier to assess our returns, but there is going to have to be a wee bit of detective work going on while doing this!

What Are Your Social Media Marketing Goals?

Every blogger has different goals for their social media efforts and it is important to note what you are trying to accomplish with your social posts. 

I am super focused on driving traffic to my blog where I have ads to get revenue and an email optin that let’s me capture users. I also have the notifications they opt in to and that will help encourage repeat visitors. 

Here are some social media goals you might have!

• Get visits to your site for ad revenue
• Drive email signups
• Get people on your notifications list
• Set a retargeting pixel to use in your paid Facebook marketing campaigns
• Sell affiliate products
• Grow big social followings to attract promoted posts
• Sell ecommerce products directly from social media
• Grow a community of interested followers who can buy your stuff

Auditing Your Social Media

Once you know YOUR goals, you can start with Google Analytics to see how well your efforts are working. 

One of my goals is to get traffic for my website. With this in mind I checked my last month stats to see how many hits the different sites drove. 

Source Pie Chart

A fun way to monitor this easily is to add a pie chart on your Google Analytics Dashboard that you can look at easily every time you log in!

As you can see Google is far and away my biggest source of traffic, but when you add both Pinterest types together, it comes to a fair bit of traffic too!

To make this go to Acquisition > Traffic > Source Medium (add to dashboard, pick pie chart)

Now yours may look different than mine! You may have scads of Facebook traffic or be rocking the Instagram and getting a ton of hits there. It doesn’t matter if yours is different, it is just important to check. 

Checking Traffic Numbers 

That’s great and gives you a high level overview, but let’s get down to brass tacks… how many hits did each site send last month?

For this you go to the same place, but pick the table view. Then type in the name of your different networks… 

And you will get a report that shows you how many hits you got from that network. 

This shows all the different Pinterest properties as a percentage of my total traffic!

Because Google Analytics doesn’t count them all the social site, you need to get a overview by running this report!

Which Pins/Posts Work?

Now you want to know which of your pins or posts are working the best! So for this one I will check my Facebook posts (which are a much smaller amount!) 

Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals … Secondary Dimension > Path Level 4

If you name your posts with recognizable keywords, you can see at a glance which ones are driving the most Facebook traffic!

Just glancing at this, I see that I should be posting more Email related content than other kinds content! (just don’t forget, this is a self fulfilling prophecy!)

You can also do this with Pinterest and Google Analytics will give you a link to the exact pin that is working! Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals 

Picking Your Social Networks To Focus On

I KNOW you could go into Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter analytics and see what they are showing as your top pins or posts.

But you can’t do cool things like picking November and December of last year to see what posts or pins did good in the holiday season. Or being able to find ALL the weird little Pinterest sites that add up to lots more hits than just the US Pinterest. 

Take a few minutes and really do a review of your data and try to figure out what is working and what isn’t. I did this with Twitter and was SHOCKED! 

I checked my Acquisition > All Traffic > Source Medium for last year and found I got…

546,535 total hits

59,299 Pinterest hits

8,788 Facebook hits

and 108 from Twitter… WHAT?!?!

That was NOT A TYPO… 108 and I have over 19,000 Twitter followers. Seriously Twitter?

In 2015 I got 509 which at least was like about one a day. But now? That is less than one hit every 3 days!!!

Social Networks and Blogging

Here are some of the social networks and how they can support your blogging goals:

Facebook

Has everyone on the planet on it, but they are probably not there to specifically buy your goods or visit your site. Easy to automate and can have recurring posts. 

• Good for getting site visits
• Can drive email signups
• Paid advertising with retargeting
• Create a group where you can share your content and products
• Post your ecommerce products in sales groups 

Twitter

Has a strong tech presence and is great if you are highly engaged and building connections. Not easy to automate anymore since they require different words for each instance you post. 

• Good for getting site visits
• Can drive email signups 

Instagram

A super visual platform that is great for selling on if you have products. For bloggers it is vital to have a strong IG presence if you want to do promoted posts. 

• Grow big social followings to attract promoted posts
• Sell ecommerce products directly from social media
• Grow a community of interested followers who can buy your stuff

Pinterest

Another visual platform, but great for bloggers! People on Pinterest are there to dream and plan and buy. A huge traffic driver for many bloggers. Because it is a search engine rather than a social site, growing community is harder. 

• Get visits to your site for ad revenue
• Drive email signups
• Get people on your notifications list
• Set a retargeting pixel to use in your paid Facebook marketing campaigns
• Sell affiliate products
• Sell ecommerce products directly from social media

LinkedIn

It is easy to write off little old LinkedIn for lifestyle bloggers, but financial bloggers, marketing and other business oriented bloggers can still get good traffic from LinkedIn. 

• Get visits to your site for ad revenue
• Drive email signups
• Get people on your notifications list
• Set a retargeting pixel to use in your paid Facebook marketing campaigns

I know LinkedIn has “groups” features, but if you are going to take time to grow a group, unless your market is totally on LinkedIn, I would suggest using Facebook!

How To Do A Social Media Audit For Bloggers Wrapup

Okay, so I found out some “stuff” while auditing my own social media for this post. Had you asked me beforehand whether my Twitter traffic was down I would have said, OF COURSE, everyone’s is!

But to have it be such a drop and produce so little traffic for any effort is just shocking on a whole new level. 

That said, I am always pleasantly surprised when I realize how much traffic I am getting from Pinterest. I feel like my efforts there are really starting to pay off in a big way. 

Hopefully this helps you decide to take a look at your social media stats and make some decisions about where to spend your time!

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