If you have been working on your project's social media for some time now and you think that your digital strategy is not bringing you the benefits you expected, perhaps it’s time to carry out a diagnostic of your brand's online presence. And as is usually the case with almost all assessments, a third-party perspective usually provides a more accurate reading of what the remedy should be. The good news is that we can help you.
So far this year we have carried out social media diagnostics for public institutions, museums, industrial companies and B2C business models. On many occasions, there was an initial social media plan that was diverted in the day-to-day, perhaps because plans are not as flexible as business changes and social media itself might require. The point is, after a few months or a few years, the condition of social media in many projects is no longer what it should be. And understanding what needs to be fixed is not always obvious.
In any case, it is a matter of understanding what quantitative and qualitative objectives were expected to be achieved, what resources are available and who is the direct competition or the closest references. And with this information, consider point by point what can be improved. At Zinkdo we already have a script based on experience that we then adapt on a case by case basis...
What a social media diagnostic should include
We can therefore define a list of points to be reviewed in our diagnostic:
- Design: Do avatars, header images, links, biography, etc. work well, and do they best describe the role of each social media platform in your strategy?
- Indicators: What objectives does social media have to meet in your case, and how far or how close are they today to those milestones? Here we usually review the indicators of reach, traffic to the website, as interactions for each audience. The range of cases is very broad, but it is always necessary to go beyond the most obvious "egometrics" such as the followers of each channel or likes given to content. Basically, it is about seeing the impact of social media on the business model, not so much on the platforms themselves.
- Relationships: here we look at who is following us, who should be following us. Who we follow and who we are not following. And also, to see how we handle ourselves in conversation: do we answer everything and well, are we proactive in initiating dialogues, how popular are we compared to our competitors?
- Content: we evaluate from the most global (are we talking about the most interesting topics? And in what proportion? Is it what we had initially planned or have we deviated? Are we talking about too many different topics or have we stayed in too monothematic a niche?) to the most tactical (content format, types of content, copy techniques, quality of graphic resources...).
- Good and not so good practices: this is about seeing what we are good at and what we should improve, and in many cases, what we can learn from competitors and benchmarks and in which specific aspects we are stronger.
Ideally, this diagnostic should be expanded with a few more details depending on the nature of the project. In some cases we have added details about:
- Relationship between corporate brands and personal brands (in the case of entrepreneurs or companies with managers and spokespersons who already have an interesting presence on social media).
- Relationship of the brand's profiles with the profiles of influencers in their areas of interest.
- Performance of social media ads campaigns.
- What type of user follows us on each platform and who do we follow? Here we can create robot portraits or buyer personas of such audiences, both from the data provided by the networks and by using sampling tools or even a random selection of users. Are we capturing the attention of who we wanted, who we thought was listening to us, or the opposite?
A good social media diagnostic (which can sometimes be complemented with a website assessment) will show us how to take action: we will know what we need to improve, what is tour top priority, and what we need to measure to make sure that, after carrying out the assessment, our social media presence really meets the objectives it should achieve.
If you think you need help, that our outside perspective can provide you with those answers, let's talk, we'll be happy to check how you're doing.