The new year can be a time for reflection, building on success and learning from mistakes. To kick off your new year why not consider a social media audit and evaluation of 2017? This will allow you to learn from your successes and the not-so successful and look back on anything else you may have put into practice that was well received.

So, where do you begin? I’ve pulled together some starting points for you to think about, from your social media accounts to your follower growth.

Review all of your accounts

Do you regularly update your social media channels? If you do, then great, but are they all working as well as each other, and is your audience active on these channels? It’s important to be aware of where your audience ‘hang out’ and ensure you are there.

Some channels work better than others depending on your business and audience, whether they are consumers or fellow professionals.

If you don't regularly update your channels, it’s worth considering why. Is it because you are struggling to keep on top of them all?

Is it because you can't think of content? Perhaps this is the time to review which ones work well and which ones don’t. It’s far better to have two really effective social media accounts with great engagement, than six that have hardly any engagement.

Measure account effectiveness

Virtually all of the main social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin allow you to measure the effectiveness of your content, measure your followers and measure engagement. Hopefully you have been looking at your results throughout 2017, allowing you to look back on these and find out how well you performed. You could also compare this with the previous year.

Check your account settings and admin levels

This is a very easy area to forget about, and all to often I have seen businesses with admin access to old employees who have left, or accounts set up that no one actually has access to.

To effectively manage your brand online and its reputation, it’s important you keep track of your admins and their access, and who in the business has that access and why. It is always better to have more than one with access, with a view that they may leave, but also in the event they are off long term sick or other circumstances preventing them from accessing the account. A simple spreadsheet with admin access that is reviewed quarterly will allow you to effectively keep track of this.

Competitors

It’s important to be aware of your competitors. Who they are and what they are doing. You can learn a lot from them! Do you have any new competitors or is there an existing competitor that could potentially take your audience away from your brand due to their offering? It’s important to be aware of competitors and what they are doing and where you can build on their successes for your own benefit.

Posting frequency

Did you change the volume of content you were producing? An increase or decrease could have a marked effect on how your audience perceives your brand, whether it has a negative or positive impact.