Welcome to spring! Yes, we finally saw the first day of spring on March 20. For many people, spring brings a sense of renewed purpose: they want to start fresh by cleaning their houses, getting a new wardrobe for warmer weather and getting into outdoor activities.

If you’re in renewal mode, now is a good time to look at your marketing plan, especially your social medal strategy. Here are some suggestions for performing a social media audit:

• Brand check. In order to have credibility, trust and awareness for your organization, you must be consistent in your brand message across all social media. Start by compiling a list of all your social media profiles.
  • Review each profile, looking at language, design, website links and brand voice.
  • Are you using the same profile photo or avatar on all profiles?
  • Are you using a consistent header or cover image?
  • Do you have identical bios, descriptions and URLs across all profiles?
  • Any inconsistencies that you find should be corrected immediately.
• Review your social media schedule. How frequently are you posting to each channel?
  • Compile an average monthly number of postings by looking at the past three months of posts.
  • Use the insights/metrics tools provided by each channel to assess engagement.
  • Adjust your posting schedule as needed for improved engagement.
• Goal review. Once you’ve reviewed your social media activity and engagement results, it’s time to assess your social media goals. Are you meeting your goals? If not, this is the time to make adjustments to either your goals, your social media strategy or both. If you don’t already have monthly, quarterly and annual goals for social media, this is a good time to establish them.
• Social media ranking. With the information you’ve gathered from the steps above, look at your success (or lack thereof) with each channel. Which channels are working the best for you? If one or more channels is not performing well for you, it’s time to think about deleting that channel. It may be that your target audience just is not active on that particular channel, and it’s not worth using your valuable time on it. On the other hand, focus on the channels that are successful and invest your efforts in them.
• Competitive analysis. Look at what your top three competitors are doing with social media. What’s working for them? Do you see a gap in a competitor’s efforts? If so, find a way to fill that gap with your organization’s social media efforts. Another way to gather strategic information is to look at brands you admire, whether they are competitors or even in the healthcare space.

Finally, if you don’t already have a content calendar, this is a great time to create one. You need a central repository for all your content efforts, including social media. You can create your own calendar or take advantage of the many content calendar templates available online.