When was the last time you took a look at your social media marketing efforts? Are you certain that your content and profiles are properly optimized? Are you certain that your online presence is in alignment with your brand? If not, take a couple minutes and regroup.

Performing a social media audit is not necessarily the same as an in-depth, deep-dive into the analytics but rather a brush over to determine what (if any) maintenance issues may have been pushed off to the side that should be addressed. Taking care of the small issues can help with establishing a more robust social media presence.

This blog post will help shed some light on the areas to look at.

1. Look at Your Graphics

All of the social media profiles now allow customized design elements that can all tie directly into your branding. Take a look at your icons, backgrounds, avatars, banner ads, and profile pictures to ensure they adequately reflect your brand.

Be consistent when using profile images or logo images. Use the same one on all social media platforms so visually people who visit these sites will instantly recognize your company.

Take advantage of the “alt-tag” or image description placeholder for all images on your site(s). Give the picture a name and remember one of the rules of on-page SEO – A text description on images helps with search engine indexing!

Where possible, use content in the background images that provide advertising and linking to not only your website but all of your social media networks as well.

2. Make Sure You Have a Complete Profile

Again, the profile, “about us”, bio, and description pages are a rich place to talk extensively about your company, products and services because they are extremely search engine friendly. From an SEO perspective, search engines read these sections of your social media profiles the exact same way they read the meta description and title tags off of a website, causing them to show up in the search results. The search results are generally what trigger the reader to click and visit the site.

Don’t leave any stone uncovered! Fill out the information on these pages as completely as possible, make sure you are using relative keywords in your text that tie directly back to your product and service, not necessarily to the name of your company.

From a general perspective, double check your contact information, hours of operation if available, your address, website, email and links to any other social networks you participate in.

3. Monitor Social Network Activities

Could you be doing a better job of interacting with your audience? Monitoring the engagement on social networks is an easy way to gauge how well you interact with your fans, followers and connections. Take a little time to go back through the conversations and compile a list of any potential issues you see and set aside some time to figure out how best to address them.

Are you missing any opportunities to engage with your audience? Scan through your posts and look for anything you may have missed that could have been worth addressing and address it, regardless of if the message was on a post or a directly message. Going forward this will help you to remember what types of entries to look for and how to be more engaging in the conversation.

Run a search for your company name on social media platforms, major search engines like Google and Bing, and on at least one service like NameChk. You essentially want to look for any red flags and impostors.

After looking at the engagement on your profiles and mentions of your brand identify, take some time to jot down ideas for addressing them. For example, are there common themes that you could answer with a blog post or campaign?

4. Look over Internal Accounts

This particular part of the audit could be tricky, depending on how your company is set up. The upside is that once you do this a few times, you will start to develop a process for addressing any issues that come out of the audit.

First off, ensure all login information for company accounts is current and in a secure location accessible to those who need it. It’s a good idea to use the same email address for all social accounts, but use something like social@thecompanyemail.com or yourcompany@gmail.com. That way your social profiles aren’t tied to a single employee and you’ll always have access. I had a client whose marketing manager left on bad terms and no one could access the social accounts. They were all tied to the ex-manager’s personal Gmail account. It took two months to get access and change everything.

Also, review internal policies and guidelines for employee social media usage, and check public employee profiles for compliance. If an employee’s account is set to private, don’t worry about it unless you suspect issues. If it’s been a while since you’ve circulated your policy, send it out, along with a few reminders on how to remain compliant.

Next, review training materials. Double check privacy policies and instructions on how to post to platforms. The reason: you want to make sure that the next time you have a training class you aren’t using outdated information.

This audit outline is by no means complete, it’s a starting place. Each time you go through this process you’re going to discover things you do and don’t want to look at and end up evolving it into something that fits your needs. Just like everything you do in social media, make this your own.