What is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit creates a clear picture of your current social efforts and shows you the best way to improve results. When you’re finished, you’ll have a single strategy document for all your social channels, with key details at your fingertips.

When you perform a digital social media audit, you want to answer three questions:

• What’s working? What metrics and best practices do you succeed at? What kind of content works for your audience?
• What’s not working? Do you see a lack of engagement somewhere? Do you have content that doesn’t resonate with your followers?
• What can you improve? Taking the answers to the last two questions into account, what can you do to improve your social media performance?

Why Does A Social Media Audit Matter?

You’ll discover what’s working and what isn’t.

Identifying top-performing posts will reveal what your audience is resonating with the most. This information might show you what offers the most value to your visitors, in turn encouraging you to produce more content that is similar. For instance, if you notice that video content receives a higher engagement rate, you would want to try producing more video content to see if it performs just as well over time. Learning what your audience enjoys the most and adapting your strategy to provide the most value to your customers is important for building a strong brand, growing your following over time and increasing your brand’s credibility.

You’ll build your brand’s credibility.

It’s important that your branding, user handle, profile image and voice are consistent across all your social media channels. A social media audit will reveal these types of inconsistencies. Unless these inconsistencies are strategic, you will want to correct them. Regularity and uniformity on social media are beneficial for many reasons.

It also improves your brand recognition, in turn crafting your overall image as reliable, credible and organized. These characteristics are obviously powerful in distinguishing you from your competitors as well.

You’ll understand your audiences better.

One feature of analytics is the ability to view demographic data. Demographic data allows you to see certain characteristics of your following such as age, gender, location and when a user is the most active on the application. This type of insight will help you better cater to your audience and create more relevant content for them.

You’ll have the information you need to set up specific goals and objectives.

Goals are a key component of a worthwhile social media audit. Whether you already had specific goals at the start of your audit or not, the information you collect from an audit will allow you to make educated adjustments to existing goals or form new ones. 

How To Do a Social Media Audit

Step 1: Review Your Social Profiles

Before you explore your social media profiles’ analytics, make sure their main pages follow the best practices for their marketing platforms. For every page, you’ll want to ask these questions:

• Is the profile picture up to date and in the same style as my other brand assets?
• Is the profile bio updated and using on-brand language?

Step 2: Evaluate Your Current Performance

Everything on the front end of your account — your profile — looks good. Let’s explore the back end — your analytics. Record your social media metrics from the previous year in your checklist or audit spreadsheet. You’ll need them to look for trends in your statistics. The most important metrics for a social media audit include:

• Followers
• Follower Growth %
• Engagement Rate
• Number of Posts
• Referral Traffic

If you use a social media scheduling platform, you’ll find most of these numbers in its Analytics menu.

Step 3: Analyze Your Social Media Content

Metrics show your accounts’ overall performance, but you’ll need to look at your content to see which posts generate those numbers. Your goal for this step will be to analyze what types of content you post and how they compare. You could go through your accounts manually to see what kind of content you post, but we suggest exporting your posts and categorizing them in a spreadsheet. Start by exporting your posts through the following menus:

• Facebook and Instagram: Business Suite Insights’ Content page
• Twitter: Analytics’ Tweets page
• Pinterest: Analytics’ Overview page
• LinkedIn: Analytics’ Updates page

Step 4: Document It All in Your Template

You’re on the home stretch. Let’s plug the data you gathered into your audit spreadsheet. Start with the individual profile tabs and bring it all together on the summary tab. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you fill in the template:

• If you followed our steps for gathering data, you’ll have blank spots for metrics like impressions, and that’s fine. Feel free to fill in any additional metrics that you know how to find, but it’s not mandatory.
• The SWOT analysis: identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Threats
• Some platforms share reach numbers instead of impressions — replace impression data with reach data as needed.
• Go ahead and leave any YoY (year-over-year) sections blank if you don’t have last year’s data.