5 Reasons You Need to Audit Your Social Media Profiles RIGHT NOW!

Recently I was reading through a promo thread in a Facebook Group I’m a member of, looking to see if there were any offers I wanted to look into further. One of the posts was from a Virtual Assistant (VA) and I was looking to add one to my team. Her post interested me, so I clicked on her name so I could follow the links to her Business Page and then to her website to check her out further. Her personal profile looked ok, no big red flags there (yes, we really do check out your personal page!) There was a link to her Business Page, so I went there to check it out. In this case I was underwhelmed by the content on her Business Page, but I still wanted to check out her website, so I clicked on the About tab to find the listed website.

I never contacted this VA after all. Want to know why? It’s what led me to write a long post in that group and what inspired today’s blog, too.

Links Break

There are many reasons why a link to your website could be broken: you’ve changed to https, you updated your domain name, or maybe you’ve accidentally let your domain name or hosting package expire. I’m not sure what happened in the case of this VA, but the link on her Facebook Page was broken. I expect a VA to be very detail oriented, so missing this one detail was enough to put me off. Besides the link to your website from Facebook, you should also check these links:

• the social icons on your website: do they link to the right profiles?
• your Twitter bio
• your Instagram bio
• any other directories you participate in regularly (Chamber of Commerce, Houzz, About.me, etc.)

Tag Lines and Vision Statements Change

When was the last time you made a major change to your mission, vision or visual brand? Perhaps you updated that in the one area you most frequent, but did you get it in all the social networks your customers are using? Did it make it to your LinkedIn summary and headline? Here’s a great list of places to update your mission or vision when you change it.

Contact Information Changes

I can’t even remember how many times I’ve written to people on LinkedIn and let them know something in their profile was out of date. Things like current email addresses and phone numbers! When people change jobs, or when entrepreneurs rebrand and change website domains, often the LinkedIn contact information doesn’t get updated. OFTEN. LinkedIn is more and more a way people will reach out to you, so if you’re not on the platform consistently, you’d better make sure your contact info is correct! Just last week I mentioned to a new connection something about the city he lived in. “Why do you think I live there?” he said. I told him it was because his current position, his own marketing agency, was listed as being in that city. He immediately went and updated it. See…stuff happens. An audit will help you find the things you’ve forgotten or missed.

Platforms Add New Features

Another big reason to audit your profiles is to ensure you’ve filled out and turned on or off any new features the platforms have added. For example, is the “Our Story” box on your Facebook Page filled out? That’s been there for close to two years now I think and I still see so many Pages where it is still blank. Or how about your Instagram bio; does it contain hashtags and/or links to other accounts you might own? Are you using Instagram Story Highlights on your profile? A good audit check list will help you find the things you’ve missed.

Is the Page Verified?

NOTE: As of October 2019 Facebook has removed all grey verification badges on pages. Stay tuned to see if they bring in something new.

 

How much money are you leaving on the table? I didn’t contact that VA because of the broken link. How many other people found the same broken link and haven’t contacted her? I see things like this across industries on a daily basis. And if I’m seeing it, so are your ideal clients. What other reasons can you think of to complete a social media audit?

Sign up for my free 7-day course to build your social media strategy!