Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Chapter 4

Auditing Your Social Media Program

Just as listening before engaging in social media is important, there are many who augment the PDCA Deming cycle by preceding it with an O for observation. Others have called this step “grasp the current condition.”1 An audit should not be solely about your own social media channels but rather about all your digital properties and marketing channels. As mentioned repeatedly in this book, your social media program should not exist within a silo in your company and it should be integrated with all your outward-facing properties and efforts. Furthermore, the notion of an audit should also be spread out to include the social media presence of competitors. By doing so, you might be able to find a role model to help guide your business in the social media journey, especially if you are a relative latecomer to using social media.

EXISTING DIGITAL PROPERTIES AND MARKETING CHANNELS

Let’s first take a look at your current existing digital properties and marketing channels to understand how social media might be better integrated with them. Note that we will cover social media integration in more depth in Chapter 16.

Assuming that your company is an established business, you probably already have a number of existing marketing channels, in both traditional and digital spaces, that should be considered when deciding how social media can best be integrated with their presence:

• A website can be fully integrated with social media.
• Newsletters can ...