Running a social media audit is a game-changer for businesses looking to maximize their social media impact. It empowers you to uncover valuable insights, streamline your social media strategy, and align your channels with business objectives to drive growth.
We’ve put together this comprehensive guide to walk you through each step of a social media audit, from evaluating engagement metrics to setting data-driven goals. We cover essential tools, provide real-world examples, and share a checklist for a seamless social media audit experience.
Key Takeaways:
- A social media audit provides clarity on what’s working and where to improve.
- Reviewing platform engagement metrics can highlight each channel’s unique strengths.
- Setting platform-specific goals and tracking them regularly ensures lasting success.
What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a systematic review of all active social media accounts to evaluate their effectiveness in supporting your business goals. Through this audit, businesses gain a clear understanding of performance metrics, audience engagement levels, and areas for strategic improvement. Most social media channels have a plethora of data available to account holders and a social media audit helps you to harness that data for supercharged business growth. By examining account details, engagement metrics, demographics, and traffic sources, businesses can align their social media presence with their overarching brand strategy.
What Are the Benefits of a Social Media Audit?
Social Media Audits Help You Make Decisions with Confidence
Conducting a social media audit gives you the data-driven insight needed to make strategic decisions. It allows you to see which platforms are most effective for reaching your target audience, which content resonates best, and whether adjustments in platform focus or posting strategy are needed. The numbers don’t lie, so this clarity empowers you to confidently adjust and adapt your approach based on performance rather than assumptions.
Social Media Audits Make It Easier to Highlight Social’s Business Impact
Social media audits offer concrete data on how each social platform contributes to business goals, such as website traffic, lead generation, or brand awareness. When presenting to stakeholders, being able to quantify the return on investment (ROI) of your social media efforts adds credibility and showcases social media as a vital part of your brand’s overall growth.
Social Media Audits Save You Serious Time in the Long-Run
Although conducting a social media audit requires an initial time investment, it ultimately saves you time by pinpointing ineffective strategies that can be improved or eliminated. When you get a clear picture of what is working on each social media channel, all you need to do is replicate it. You can shift resources to high-performing content and streamline processes, ensuring that your social media team’s time and efforts are concentrated on impactful activities.
Let’s get into how you can actually conduct a social media audit.
How to Do a Social Media Audit
1. Start with the Basics
Begin by listing all social media profiles associated with your brand, including platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We also recommend taking a look at any less active accounts. ‘Why?’, you may ask. Even though those accounts may be less active, they could still be untapped potential so you want to make sure you’re looking at them during a social media audit.
Document each account’s URL, handle, follower count, and key metrics. This inventory gives a foundation for understanding your social media landscape and ensures all active accounts align with current branding and business objectives.
2. Analyze Each Profile’s Engagement
Now it’s time to look at some important metrics. Each platform’s built-in analytics tools, such as Facebook Insights or Instagram Analytics, provide valuable data on follower demographics, engagement, reach, and impressions. This data helps reveal platform strengths and weaknesses, highlighting which audiences are most engaged and where content is performing best.
3. Use Your Social Media Audit To Find the Patterns
As you are gathering data for your social media audit, you’ll start to notice recurring themes on what is working and what isn’t. Identifying content patterns across platforms is essential for gaining insight into what resonates most with your audience. We recommend analyzing factors such as:
- Optimal posting times
- Types of content (video, image, text, or carousel) that is posted
- Engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments
When you take a look at these factors, you can determine which formats and themes consistently drive interaction. Recognizing these patterns not only highlights what your audience values but also enables you to tailor your social media strategy effectively. This data-driven approach helps you plan future content, optimize timing, and improve engagement, which is typically linked to your social media impact and reach.
4. Identify Your Top-Performing Social Media Posts
Next, you need to look at the best of the best on your social media. A social media audit reveals top-performing content by analyzing metrics like engagement and reach. Remember that top-performing content will vary depending on the industry in which your business operates. For example, B2B brands excel with educational posts, entertainment businesses often thrive with behind-the-scenes content, and e-commerce companies benefit from product demos and user-generated content. Identifying these patterns helps brands refine strategy, boost engagement, and drive better results across social platforms.
5. Figure Out How You’re Funneling Your Social Media Traffic
Now it’s time to determine if social media is effectively doing its job, which is to get potential customers to your website. Social media traffic analysis reveals which channels drive users to your website and where conversions occur. Using tools like Google Analytics, track referral traffic from each platform to view metrics that show which channels are most effective at generating leads and sales. By tracking user flow, you can optimize your content to encourage action and conversion.
6. Set Goals for Each Platform
You’re at the point in the social media audit where you need to look at the data and make reasonable goals based on how your social media is currently performing. To do this, define specific, measurable goals for each platform, such as increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or boosting engagement. Examples of goals for each social media channel include:
- Instagram: Aim to boost brand awareness with a 20% increase in follower growth.
- LinkedIn: Focus on generating leads by increasing post engagement by 15%.
- Facebook: Drive traffic to your website by growing link click-throughs by 25% .
Tailored goals maximize platform potential. The goals should be customized to each platform’s unique strengths so your objectives align with both the platform’s capabilities and your business needs.
7. Make a Plan
Now that you have your goals, you need to create a strategic plan based on your social audit insights , outlining actions like posting frequency, content themes, and engagement strategies for each platform. Schedule regular check-ins including:
- Monthly for tracking engagement
- Quarterly for follower growth
- Annually for overall ROI
These check-ins allow you to adjust and refine tactics. This data-driven approach ensures your social media efforts achieve measurable, impactful results.
8. Assess New Platforms
The final step in conducting a social media audit is to stay on top of trends and be ready for changes in the future. Social media is constantly evolving, and new platforms frequently emerge. Consider whether exploring new channels, like TikTok or emerging niche networks, could help you reach additional segments of your target audience. Periodic assessments of new platforms ensure that you remain adaptable in an ever-changing social media landscape.
We recommend a strategic approach to conducting a social media audit, but as a way to enhance your audit, check out the templates below.
Social Media Audit Examples
Quesenberry Social Media Audit Example
Our first example is Keith Quesenberry’s social media audit template, from his book Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution. It uses the five Ws (who, where, what, when, and why) to evaluate each channel. This structured approach helps identify areas of opportunity and challenge, which gives a balanced view of each platform’s strengths and weaknesses.
JourneyEngine Social Media Audit Example
The JourneyEngine template emphasizes engagement metrics and post thumbnails. Using this approach, you can get a visual and data-rich snapshot of your brand’s social media performance. This example is particularly useful for businesses that prioritize in-depth engagement analysis over broad metrics.
Google Analytics Social Media Audit Example
Using Google Analytics, this audit focuses on tracking social media referrals, including user behavior and engagement on the website. The data is divided into two sections: acquisition and behavior. Both sections work together to provide insights into how users from different platforms interact with your website.
Social Media Audit Tools
Sprout Social
Sprout Social provides a solution for both social media management and analytics. It can be used during a social media audit to track audience engagement, demographics, and top-performing content across various platforms. With reporting features and real-time insights, Sprout Social can help businesses monitor performance, refine their strategy, and optimize their social media impact efficiently.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides insights into your website and its performance. But did you know that it can also be used to show how social media drives traffic to your website? By setting up tracking for social referrals, you can analyze traffic sources, session duration, and conversions to gauge each platform’s effectiveness in achieving business goals.
Salesforce (or CRM)
Salesforce, combined with social media data, allows you to track customer interactions and understand social media’s role in the customer journey. This integration can reveal the direct impact of social engagement on lead generation and conversion, which is a valuable insight that can be pulled from a social media audit.
Social Media Audit Checklist
To ensure a thorough audit, use the following checklist:
- Account Inventory: List all social accounts with URLs and handles.
- Brand Consistency: Check for unified branding across profiles.
- Engagement Metrics: Collect and compare data on engagement, reach, and demographics.
- Content Review: Analyze top posts and content patterns.
- Traffic Analysis: Track social-driven traffic and conversions.
- Goal Setting: Define clear, measurable goals tailored for each platform.
- Platform Assessment: Review untapped opportunities on new and emerging platforms.
Use this checklist as a roadmap to keep your social media audit on track and ensure that each area of social media performance is evaluated.
Get Started on Your Social Media Audit
A social media audit is a powerful tool for refining your strategy, boosting engagement, and demonstrating the business value of social media. Launching a social media audit today can help to get you on the right track but remember that regular audits give you a deeper understanding of your audience and help you adjust your tactics based on real data. It’s best practice to perform social media audits throughout the year so you can keep a pulse on what’s working to drive growth in your business.
