How to Audit your College's Social Media Channels

Social media is an integral part of your digital marketing efforts. It gives businesses and colleges direct access to their target audience, increasing conversions and optimising ROI. 

In order to create a successful social media campaign, it helps to do an audit your social media channels first. An audit can help you track the success of campaigns and assess if social media is supporting your wider marketing efforts. 

What is a Social Media Audit?

An audit of your social channels is a comprehensive assessment of what is working within your campaigns - and what isn't. Through this assessment the audit shows your successes, failings, and opportunities to connect with your audiences even more across channels.

Depending on the importance of your social media marketing within your college’s campaign strategy, your social media audit could be done annually, biannually, or monthly. An audit can seem time consuming and daunting, but it needn’t be. There are many online resources providing checklists to help you complete a successful audit.

An audit will help you to monitor and adjust campaigns over time, and incorporate changes into your channels that will meet to your target audience's needs. A successful social media audit will give your team detailed analysis of your channels and will clearly show areas of improvement and how to meet your overall goals.

Simple steps to an effective audit

Step 1: Record your Channels

Begin your audit process by recording information on each of your college’s social media pages, this may include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Blogs and beyond. Include a page that also represents other departments within your college and not just the college as a whole. For example, it may be that your college’s art department and science department have separate social media accounts that show what the students are working on in lessons.

It is a good idea to include accounts like this in your audit as they are also part of the recruitment funnel and will create their own conversions when representing your college.

Step 2: Check your Branding

Having cohesive and clear branding across your social media channels is a great way to build your college's identity online.

When completing your social media audit, check that your branding is consistent across each platform. Is your college logo evident across each page? Is all the content consistent and following your overall vision? Are your brand colours being used? Are all URLs and usernames uniform? Checking off these branding points for each social media page can help to highlight any minor discrepancies within your channels ensuring your college's values shine through, no matter what channel your target audience lands on. It is key to make note of these discrepancies, change them and follow up with your team to ensure they are aware of your branding guidelines.

Step 3: Analyse your presence

Having a presence on every single social media channel out there isn’t necessary, nor is it wise without an effective strategy to drive relevant content. It would take a lot of time, energy, and manpower to execute an effective plan for each individual page and with each serving a different purpose (and audience) it is far better to be strategic about which channels you use and why.

It is a good idea, as part of your audit, to discuss with your team which page you feel has the most value when marketing your college. Consider engagement, brand exposure and conversions amongst other metrics. Work with your team to identify why you feel each page does or does not add value to your marketing strategy. It is a good idea to rank these as you go so you have clear indicator on which channels are worth putting more work into, then invest some time on a content strategy for each channel.

Collecting your metrics and data together is a useful way of clearly seeing how the public interact with your channels. From there you can complete further analysis using the questions below to assess the overall value your pages have to create interest and conversions:

• Is the purpose of this account clear?
• What is the target market for this page and are they interacting with it?
• How do audiences react to postings?
• Is there a correlation between audience growth and page activity?
• What are the goals for this page and are they being met?
• Is the college's ethos and vision clear on this page?
• How is the page performing compared to previous months or years?

Placing these answers into a spreadsheet will allow your College to cross compare data and answer questions on why other pages are performing better and how to correct this.

Step 5: Next Steps

Now you have all the data and information on your social media pages, it’s time to plan your next steps. Having identified your overall goals for each page, create an action plan to bring you closer to meeting these goals. You may also plan to delete certain low performing accounts. It is not a failing of your college should you decide to do this, keeping a low performing social media account and persisting in efforts that don’t suit your target audience takes time and planning away from your high performing channels.

The goal of social media marketing for most colleges, is to provide your audiences with easily-accessible, engaging content. Following your audit, aim to try a more targeted approach, aimed at reaching your prospects and converting more enrolments for your college. 

Ready to take your audit to the next level? Consider completing competitor analysis, basing your content strategy around identified marketing personas, or completing a SWOT analysis of your college's brand and position in the market first.

Ready to embrace inbound marketing? Book a free consultation with our Education Growth Consultant.