Social Account Audits – Why it’s important

When was the last time you looked over your various social media account profiles? I’m referring to both your personal as well as business accounts.

Let me say that again – both personal AND business.

Why both?
Why is this important?
Isn’t it enough that you just have an account setup?

In this blog article I’ll explain:

• why it’s essential that you do a social media account and profile audit for BOTH personal and business accounts at least every three months
• what you should look out for
• how doing this exercise will help you stay at the top of the minds of your friends and contacts, so you can grow your professional reputation and business success
  

Here are our top five reasons for doing an audit to your social accounts:

1. Social platforms change rapidly
Depending on how active you are with your social media marketing, you may or may not be aware that the platforms are constantly and continually evolving. Facebook alone is known to make changes weekly, if not more frequently. Many of the social platforms don’t tell users about all of these changes either. More importantly, if you are not actively looking to stay in the know about these changes you may not ever notice.

The most significant changes that can affect how you “look” on social platforms are the changes to the platform User Interface or UI. Almost every platform has changed their UI in the last year. What does this mean for you? For one, your profile pictures and cover photo may need to be adjusted if the size of the image area has changes. Also, Facebook sometimes changes how information is displayed over a Page cover photo. If you have text on your cover photo it may now be covered by text or even buttons.

In addition to image changes, sometimes the platforms will change what information is actually visible on your profile. There may be more options for you to include additional information – so make sure you are checking frequently!

2. You own personal info has likely changed (job, interests, photos)
Your business grows and evolves, as do some of your own interests. Have a look at your company bio and links (maybe you are no longer using a specific social media platform – why link to it if you don’t actively use it?). Look at your summary, job history and other details on LinkedIn. Have a look at your Twitter bio and consider what you might change? Facebook (your personal profile) is a trove of collected information. Not only do you possibly have “friend” connections you might want to purge, but you likely have pages you liked a long time back that you might want to clear out, groups you want to “unjoin” etc. Facebook is known to use this data to help target ads to users and clearing this info out might help you to no longer see some annoying ads that you have zero interest in.

3. People connect with YOU First – then your business

I mentioned earlier that reviewing your “personal” profiles along with your business profiles is important. Many people don’t consider that it’s the person behind a business that people really want to connect with. You may not realize that people are looking at, and may try to connect with, or follow you on your personal profiles as well. Have a look at your account bios, cover photos, even the type of content you are posting and sharing. Is your account public or private? You might want to consider making an adjustment depending on how you connect with your customers and the type of relationship you want to create. This is a great segway to point number four.

4. How you use social accounts may have changed – private or public

For your personal accounts, have a look at the content you are sharing publicly. Do you want your customers or potential customers to see this info? How much personal info do you want to share with the world? I’m not going to tell you whether you should go private or public – that’s a personal decision you have to make – I’m just suggesting you think about it and that will help you stop and think before posting on selected accounts.

5. Your accounts may be linked

Another factor to look at is if you have social accounts connected to each other. By this I don’t mean whether or not you have LINKS to each social profile on each platform. What I’m referring to here is whether or not you have them linked to cross promote your posts. Many people used to connect their platforms, for example, to save time people would connect Twitter posts to automatically post the same content (tweet) onto Facebook. My recommendation is to break these ties. Both the audience on each platform as well as the structure and use of the platforms are very unique. Twitter for example is limited to 140 characters, while Facebook allows for a much longer post. People on Facebook also don’t like to see as many hashtags as one might use on Twitter. On that note, hashtags are still very popular on Instagram, but if you use 20 – 30 on a given post on Instagram, you won’t want to post that exact post to Facebook. It makes sense to post on each platform independently.

Here are a few other small things to look for:

• Make sure your contact information is up to date
• Look for messages you may have missed (your Facebook inbox, Twitter direct messages)
• Look for new invite or connection requests
• Check notification settings on each platform – these may have changed
• Check to see if there are software updates for apps for iPhone/Android so you have latest features

If you haven’t taken a look at your social platforms in a while, we hope you will consider doing a review so you can be sure you are putting you best image forward to both your friends and clients.

You’ll likely find a few things you can change or improve. Sometimes these changes (such as changing a profile cover photo) can be published in your feed and that can be used to your advantage as another way to have your audience see an update from you.

Let us know in the comments if you have found something else you’ve deemed important to review with your own social accounts and how we can help you do a social account audit.