When Should the Social Media Marketing Audit Occur ?

When teaching social media marketing analytics, consider teaching the social media marketing audit process after conducting higher-level organizational assessments such as the Social Media Marketing Maturity Model Assessment from the last blog post in this series (Zahay, 2021).  The next step for an organization after this higher level assessment should be to look in more detail at the organization’s current social media marketing efforts.  The social media audit (or review) can be defined as an evaluation of an organization’s use of social media and compared to an established set of goals and objectives.  The social media marketing audit should go beyond the organizational readiness stage and investigate what the organization is doing on specific social media platforms.

HubSpot provides an excellent outline for the social media audit (King, 2017). The HubSpot approach suggests that the audit means taking a hard look at the data from all platforms and that the results might help companies do the following:

1. Develop a social media strategy that aligns to specific, actionable business objectives and goals
2. Discover trends to create or modify social media campaigns
3. Provide insight into customer sentiment and brand perceptions.
4. Provide insight to manage and justify social media spending

The main aspects of the review should be Data, Goals, Profile, Content Performance and Competition.  One useful model for the Goals Section of the audit is known as the PIE model.

PIE (Potential, Importance and Ease of Implementation)

The PIE model is one model that can be used to assist goal creation and prioritization in the social media marketing audit. Originally used to prioritize conversion rate optimization tests, the PIE model can be adapted to the social media audit context quite easily. The PIE model rates opportunities by Potential, Importance and Ease of Implementation (hence the term PIE)  from 1 to 10 where 1 is low and 10 is high.  Potential is the technical result such the specific metrics, Importance is how the activity related to overall goals and Ease is the Ease of implementation from both a technical and political viewpoint. In this example, three different types of social media campaigns, Facebook ads, a Twitter campaign and a video log are analyzed for their overall ability to provide “lift” or improved results. Facebook ads come out the winner because of their relative importance and potential and ease of implementation.  PIE can be linked specifically to organizational goals by redefining the various aspects of Potential and Importance.  In this example, the organization is focused on controlling costs, increasing traffic and maximizing return on investment.

The PIE Model Applied to the Social Media Marketing Audit

Applying PIE to Teaching Social Media Analytics

There are many applications of this model in the classroom.  For the blogging project we discussed earlier in this blog, where students create a series of five blog posts and report the results, students can analyze their individual blog posts along this model to determine which opportunities might be most attractive for their next posts.  Students can also use this model to conduct a social media marketing audit for a client project.  This model will help them communicate to their client the best road to take in creating their next social media project.  In fact, PIE can be applied in many contexts in teaching not only social media marketing, but many aspects of digital marketing, including the original purpose, conversion rate optimization.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  My social media analytics class has ended for this seven week period.  Look for more posts when I next teach the subject.  Let me know if you have any blog post ideas.

Also, this post and the last one were adapted from the forthcoming third edition of our text Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach, by Cengage Learning (Zahay, Parker, Roberts & Barker, 2018). There is an entirely new chapter on managing the social media function including organizational assessment, the social media audit, organizing and staffing. Watch for the new edition to be available for Fall classes.

References

King, C. (2017, November 14). Check the pulse of your digital strategy with a social media audit. [HubSpot User Blog]. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/check-pulse-digital-strategy-social-media-audit

Zahay, D., Parker, J., Roberts, M.L. & Barker, D. (2022).  Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach, 3e (forthcoming). Cengage Learning.

Zahay-Blatz, D. (2020, February 22). How to assess social media analytics maturity [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://sites.stedwards.edu/dblatz/2021/02/22/smmm/