How to audit your social media activity to enhance impact
For brand managers in the motorcycle industry, social media remains a powerful platform to enhance brand visibility, engage with audiences and drive sales. This article outlines how to conduct a social media audit, in order to ensure your social media activity is effective in helping you reach realistic yet ambitious KPIs.
Why audit your social media activity?
A thorough social media audit can help you understand whether your current strategies are correctly aligned with your objectives. It can be easy to fall into the trap of producing repetitive content and looking for monthly or quarterly indicators to prove to yourself – or your manager – that your strategy is working, even if the numbers are not truly contributing to your business goals.
A comprehensive social media audit involves taking a step back from your regular reporting and analysing your brand’s performance across different social platforms, identifying trends, successes and areas for improvement.
Define your objectives and KPIs
Before starting the audit, you should clearly define your objectives, which may include:
- Growth: Increasing follower count amongst a pre-defined target audience
- Visibility: Enhancing the reach of your content
- Engagement: Boosting interactions such as likes, comments, shares, and mentions.
- Hitting key metrics: Increasing site traffic, lead generation, growing your CRM or newsletter subscriber numbers
- Customer Service: Improving response time and satisfaction
- Revenue goals: Increasing sales driven by organic and paid social activity and/or revenue from ads served against your content
Those goals and the KPIs you attach to them will vary significantly depending on the type of organisation or brand you work for within the motorcycle industry. For manufacturers, suppliers, accessory providers, e-commerce platforms, insurance companies, professional riders & teams, rental & touring companies, right up to elite level championships, the aims and objectives of their marketing and social media activity logically vary significantly.
Social media objectives in the motorcycle industry might specifically include:
- Selling more products from a specific range
- Launching a new bike successfully
- Engagement with relevant influencers in a defined audience segment of riders
- Gaining visibility for a specific brand campaign or initiative
- Gaining visibility for your sponsors or partners
- Improving the feedback you get from riders online
- Improving your overall reputation as a brand
- Driving specific amounts of converting traffic to a product page
- Taking a bigger market share from your direct competitors
For each objective, social media managers should work towards established KPIs that will help the brand or organisation reach realistic goals. Those KPIs can be based on past performance, budget/resources assigned to content creation and intelligent estimates around your addressable market.
For example, if your primary goal is engagement, your KPIs might include a 2.5% increase in average post interactions over the next quarter. If you need help figuring out what your realistic social media KPIs and objectives should be, contact our experienced social media team today for a free consultancy session.
Gather data across platforms
Once your objectives and KPIs have been reviewed - or indeed defined for the first time – it’s time to put an efficient reporting structure in place. This will form the basis of your social media audit. If you already have insightful and transparent reporting configured internally then your audit can take the form of stepping back from day-to-day activity and examining the numbers you’ve driven from your social media output over the previous year or two.
Auditing and reporting can be done by using a combination of free and paid tools to collect data from different social media platforms. Free tools include Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite, YouTube Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, TikTok Analytics and Twitter (now X.com) Analytics, which can give you the main data points you need on your own channels.
Paid analytics tools give extra insight
It can also be worth investing in paid analytics tools which provide the added advantage of being able to view the key data from all your accounts on various social media platforms in one place. Many of the best tools have dashboards which you can configure to suit your specific requirements and provide great clarity.
In addition, paid social media analytics tools provide the bonus of amalgamated data on the social media performance of other brands. They cannot give you as much detailed data about other brands as they do for your own channels, which you connect with the tools using your relevant passwords. However, they can provide useful benchmarking data for your competitors or best-in-class example brands from other sectors that are performing particularly well on social media in specific markets.
Tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Hubspot offer comprehensive analytics, detailed reporting, social listening and competitive analysis.
At the premium end of the market Meltwater is a sophisticated tool which goes beyond social media analytics to offer wider PR and marketing SaaS products. Meltwater and other tools such as Tagger by Sprout Social, CreatorIQ, Traackr, Brandwatch can be useful when you wish to identify new influencers to work with, or to measure the impact of large influencer marketing campaigns.
In our experience, usually you can get most of the data you need about your own channels from the free tools, plus a basic package from Hootsuite or Sprout Social, but it really depends on the depth of data you wish to analyse.
What are the key numbers I should analyse?
Depending on the wider goals of your social media strategy - the pre-defined objectives and KPIs we reviewed above - you may wish to measure some simple data points in your social media audit and the subsequent reporting structure you build to continually monitor progress.
If you wish to assess whether your brand is growing at a relevant rate on social media, you can keep track of your total follower number over time and also look at your growth rate per month/quarter/year. You may wish to compare this with our brands in your sector and with paid analytics tools this is easy to do. It is wise to look into the numbers of new followers you are gaining within your target audience, rather than just focussing on total follower numbers.
It’s also interesting to look at the reach of your content in terms of total impressions gained and consider the % of social media users viewing your content who are already followers of your brand vs non-followers. This will help gauge whether you are gaining visibility with your target audience.
Engagement is a key social media driver
Engagement around your content will also drive up your reach in terms of impressions and visibility, so an audit should allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content on each platform.
Seek to identify which posts received the most engagement and whether specific content formats are helping you achieve your goals, such as graphics, photo gallery posts, collab posts, reels, stories or longer form videos. For different purposes, a spectacular 20 second reel with an FMX rider might help you go viral, whereas a behind-the-scenes tour of your factory guided by your CTO might in fact drive more conversions, by underlining the credibility of your brand.
It can also be insightful to analyse when your audience is most active and adjust your posting schedule accordingly. General guidance around optimal posting times can be found in this helpful article by Sprout Social.
One very instructive number to focus on is the engagement rate. This measures the percentage of engaged users compared to your total followers. In other words, on average for each post we make, what % of our total audience engages with the published content?
This metric helps assess content effectiveness and is useful to analyse whether the total social following is just a few hundred people or several million.
Hootsuite provides specific advice and tips on this key metric and even offers an interactive engagement rate calculator. They state, “Most social media marketing experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% to 5% - but the larger your following, the harder these numbers are to achieve. Hootsuite's own social media team reported an average Instagram engagement rate of 4.59% in 2022 with 177k followers.”
Also, benchmarking your performance against competitors in terms of engagement rate can assist you in identifying what types of content your competitors are sharing and the specific tactics your competitors employ, as well as how effectively they are engaging with their audience.
Comparing performance across platforms
Assessing your own social media performance across multiple platforms is crucial for your brand in order to understand diverse audience behaviours, to optimise content, drive more traffic and maximize ROI. Different platforms attract varied demographics, making it preferable to tailor content for each. Cross-platform performance analysis should reveal which channels are driving the most engagement and conversions, guiding your budget allocation and content strategy.
Conducting a social media audit is a vital process for brand managers in the motorcycle industry to ensure their social media efforts effectively support their business objectives. By defining clear goals, leveraging the right tools and continuously optimising based on insights, you can enhance your impact, engagement, reach and conversions. If you need further personalised advice, do not hesitate to contact the Motorcycle Marketing team.
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