Why You Need a Facebook Asset Audit for Your Brand
Digital Brand Audit

Why You Should Get Your Brand’s Facebook Assets Audited Today

18 Oct, 2022

Why You Should Get Your Brand’s Facebook Assets Audited Today

Are you wondering if Facebook is worth your time and attention at all? Or are you confused about how having a good Facebook page affects your business?

In this blog post, we’ll tell you why your business page on Facebook matters. In fact, it matters so much that you should get it audited immediately.

Mainstream Facebook Audit Advice

There are many blog posts out there that tell you how to do an audit for your Facebook page. There are many checklists available to simplify the job for you. Just sit with each item on the list and fix everything that is wrong with your Facebook post.

We believe that an in-depth audit of your Facebook presence is a lot more sophisticated than that.

You should, of course, refer to these blogs in order to do a quick survey of what’s right and wrong with your Facebook page.

Most advice about Facebook audit looks at:
  1. Your header image
  2. Your profile/contact details
  3. Call to action
  4. Types and timings of posting
 
But an audit in the true sense of the term should ideally look at:
  1. Understanding analytics/insights that Facebook generates regarding your campaigns and posts to take better decisions
  2. Designing content and campaign strategy to set a benchmark for your engagement levels
  3. Calculating your cost per acquisition in terms of all the content resources you invest into your Facebook activity (and that’s more than the content you put on your page)
  4. Analyzing your performance with social listening
  5. Working towards making the best of organic reach possible in the face of the Facebook algorithm limiting the number of people who get to see your post
  6. Scrutinizing the profiles of the influencers you’re planning to work with

Most of these points require a good understanding of content, data analysis, marketing, public relations, online reputation management (ORM), and budget allocation.

Every business has its own strengths and weaknesses. The things that your audit should include will change depending on what your page is about.

Why the DIY Facebook Audit Advice Doesn’t Matter Much in Some Cases

Most business owners try out the initial audit on their own. But in cases where they’re not exposed to larger expertise in marketing and working with several industries, their self-audit doesn’t yield many actionable activities.

You might be following all the free audit advice religiously too. Or maybe skipping a few parts here and there because the items on the checklists are either too confusing or they overlap in many places.

Heck, many of them seem to talk about the same thing. And anyway, how does it matter if your call to action is “Learn More” or “Book Now”

So, you might have caught yourself cheating on a couple of items. Or a lot of them. Someone seems to have cooked up this list just to annoy you, you might think.

But the complicated list itself is not a problem. The problem lies in your not knowing why you’re doing this at all.

Time to go back to Simon Sinek. You’ve got to understand in as much detail as possible:
  1. Why should you be doing this on Facebook?
  2. Why should you have to create a Facebook business page?
  3. Why should you have any followers?
  4. Why likes, comments, and shares?
  5. Why and how should you be engaging with people on Facebook?

The point is that first, you’ve got to get convinced about why you need an audit for your simple Facebook page! After all, it’s not your P&L sheet!

But we should tell you bluntly: an audit of your Facebook presence can be as serious as an audit of your finances.

If there’s a need to get your accounts vetted by experts, what stops you from getting the same done for your crucial digital assets like the ones on Facebook?

And no, you don’t need a Facebook audit because your competitors are getting it done. Yes, they’re getting it done too! Almost always the difference between brands with a solid presence on Facebook (like on any other social network) is that they know what they’re doing.

Knowing what you’re doing comes from being in touch with the best practices, testing, and yes, auditing.

You need an audit for your presence on Facebook because it’s your asset. And when you ask for an audit, expect a lot more than analyses of your posts. An audit comes with minute details like the quantity and quality of your content, persona research specific to Facebook demographics, content meter, best practices, recommendations, and actionable tips — all of these vis-à-vis your competition.

The rationale behind Asking for a Facebook Audit

Before you ask for an audit, you yourself need to be convinced about why it’s important. Otherwise, your brief to an auditor or consultant will sound very vague. You might be taken for a ride by the team doing the audit because you’d unwittingly reveal that you don’t know what to look for in the audit report.

Here’s what you should be convinced about. Your presence and assets on the Facebook matter because:
  1. A solid presence on Facebook makes your target audience aware of you.
  2. Leveraging that presence can make it easier for you to get more followers elsewhere on other social networks.
  3. Greater exposure to your content on all social networks ensures you generate leads more easily and with less friction.
  4. Doing good on Facebook may indicate how much goodwill you have among people in general and your target audience in particular.
  5. As Mark Schaffer puts it, the customer is the marketer. Why not help the customer become a marketer on Facebook?
 
How Facebook Audit Opens a Can of Worms
01. You’ll Come to Know What Your Content Philosophy Is

Your audit will reveal how seriously you take your own marketing vision, objectives, and principles. For example, if you really believe in the power of good content to get you inbound leads, why are you putting up videos and posters wishing people in general “Happy Yoga Day”? (Note: This yoga point applies to you even if you offer yoga-related products/services. Happy Yoga Day is not sufficient in itself. It’s got to be an event in itself.)

We’ll give you more examples.

You wanted to establish that you are a youthful brand (catering to the youngsters) but you’ve been inviting comments and following from the people suffering from a midlife crisis!

If you are a school, where are the happy children on your page?

If you sell chocolates, there’s probably an overdose of chocolates on your page, bordering on food pornography! What are the reasons and occasions to consume all those chocolates?

02. You’ll Discover Something New about Facebook as a Whole

People are on Facebook for something more than regular social media reasons. The communitarian feeling is much stronger there.

Because there’s no serious limitation on Facebook like the number of characters, you can come up with many ideas for reaching out to people. It’s not only a video-based platform. It’s not limited to images.

A Facebook audit tells how you’ve been handling this freedom.

03. You’ll Come to Know How Much Facebook Really Costs You

Lately, Facebook has also gotten into a lot of controversies and that affects the way you do business there. And we’re not talking about political advertising.

Recently, advertisers sued Facebook for inflating the numbers about its reach of campaigns. It’s a serious allegation.

An audit will tell you how the analytics of your campaigns are doing in terms of conversion for you.

No social network is absolutely transparent about its data about traction. But with Facebook, it’s serious because no other network has been taken to court regarding numbers.

04. You’ll Get to Know Your Audience Better

You can use all the information you can get regarding how well-defined your target audience is on Facebook and your approach to engaging with them (and subsequently having them engage with you). How has your competition been doing with this same audience?

When it comes to trolling, the most common phrase that comes to mind is “Twitter troll”. However, trolling can be at its most extreme on Facebook. Because the person writing a review can get quite aggressive. No character limits, you see?

Again, how many of your followers are fake? And how will you know? In some cases, this requires deeper investigation.

The overall picture emerging from your audit can teach you how to handle bad reviews from other users instead of expecting the algorithm to forget about it and never show the humiliation again to other users!

Your Facebook Presence in a Nutshell

As the algorithm gets smarter and more sophisticated, each and every social network becomes a specialization in itself.

Small tweaks to your content and even your posting schedule can make a big difference to your reach on Facebook.

Whether you do a preliminary audit on your own or ask an expert to do it for you, you should be clear about the need to do it — regular hygiene check, constant testing, figuring ways to course-correct, rather than wait for something to go seriously wrong with your account.

What do you think about such an audit? Have you given it a thought before? Have you got it done professionally before? Have you noticed something about the performance of your content on Facebook that wasn’t there earlier?

Ask questions. Share your thoughts. You’ll probably find answers in the way the others respond to your comments.