Hey Hey, it’s Friday! So we aren’t wasting any time. Search Engine Journal is helping us perform a social media audit. The right way.

Let’s do this!

1. Schedule It. We’re not sure when it became a normal practice to only do an audit after something goes wrong. This boggles our mind. We wholeheartedly agree with SEJ here, proactively schedule an audit for your brand at least 2 times per year.

3. Grading Scale. It’s important to stay consistent here. You can make up your own scale in Excel.

5. Website and Blog Assessment. Review your website and blog pages for social factors like shareability, keywords, content performance, etc. Questions you should be asking yo’ self:

• Do your titles and descriptions make sense in a share?
• How about those visuals? Are they shareworthy or boring?
• What is the top performing social media network in Google Analytics?
• Are you integrating chatbots to your home page?

8. Content Style, Messaging, and Optimization. You wanna look into the overall content style and brand voice.

• Is your content robotic and informal or is it personalized and conversational?
• Does your content reflect a strategic content calendar or are you winging it?
• Are you using hashtags effectively to maximize reach?
• Is your social team taking trends into consideration?

9. Distribution and Publishing Assessment. Your content is aaahhh-maazing (in your opinion), but you still aren’t getting the exposure, reach, or results. There’s a solid chance your target audience just isn’t on that platform.

Consider distribution platforms like press releases, LinkedIn, guest posts, or tradeshows. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

11. Set Up Accurate Tracking. In this audit, you really shouldn’t be concerned with vanity metrics such as likes and comments. If you want to track actual purchases from a social post do this:

• Use UTM codes within your social media posts with shortened links to product pages.
• Track the referral source in Google Analytics or SEMrush
• Create a promo code that you only share on a social media network. Make it unique to each social platform.

In case you weren’t paying too close attention to the numbers, we skipped around a good bit. Still 6 more points to cover!

Two Laws of Content Marketing:

1. Publishing content is expensive. You’re either paying a writer or paying for it with your own time.
2. Crappy content generates crappy business.

Those two laws raise a pretty simple question: how do you know that you’re actually getting a return on that massive investment in quality content?

That question is what the Director of Content at Intercom set out to solve. He found one type of content that really makes it all worth it…

Evergreen content.

Evergreen content is content that addresses timeless themes and answers recurring questions people in your industry are going to have. It isn’t content that talks about the latest Facebook advertising hacks. It’s the type of content that will still be relevant in 5 years.

Here are a few examples of Intercom’s evergreen content. Notice that each piece answers a common, timeless question:

• Question: What are the best ways to improve my product? Blog Post: How to make product improvements.
• Question: What messages should I send to new customers? Blog Post: 5 simple messages to engage your customers.
• Question: How can I build a brand for my software company? Blog Post: So you want to build a brand? Here’s what you need to understand.

Intercom’s goal with evergreen content is to make sure that 40-60 percent of their page views are generated by articles written at least 9 months ago.

If you’re interested in going down this evergreen route, Intercom has a few suggestions for you…

1. Don’t publish and forget. Continue to share older content on social. Reshare older content with your email list. Continue to update older content with new stats, new figures, new images, etc.
2. Drop the dates. Intercom doesn’t use dates on their blog posts because that can signify that a post is old, even if it really isn’t.
3. Convert visitors with CTAs. Stop publishing content without a way to capture leads! Relevant CTAs should be added on, and in, all posts.

Lots more to learn here…

Oooh buddy, do we have a good ad for you today. Well, maybe ‘good’ isn’t the right word. In some ways, you could call it ‘cheap.’ Either way, it’s only six seconds long, was banned from YouTube, and then went viral. So we’d call that ‘good.’

Since it’s so short, we don’t wanna give anything away…just give it a watch.

P.S. This ad might scare the crap outta you. If that’s not your thing…maybe don’t watch it.

P.P.S. There’s a chance the video we linked to will be removed by the time you read this. In that case, read the Verge article about it.

P.P.P.S. If you watched it and it scared you, we’re sorry.