Key Findings
- With 37% of social browsers checking a brand’s social media before purchasing, focusing on high-performing content types directly influences sales and trust.
- Implementing SMART goals leads to clearer performance tracking using tools like Google Analytics, Meta Insights, and TikTok Analytics.
- Identifying which content types to reduce, increase, or introduce based on audit insights leads to higher engagement and audience retention.
With insights from experienced professionals, we’ll walk you through the steps of conducting a social media audit, explain its benefits, and show how to turn your findings into meaningful action. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Why Bother with a Social Media Audit?
Conducting a social media audit is the best way to learn whether or not your social media marketing strategy is working, with insights into its strengths and weaknesses. It enables you to better understand your audience's preferences and the types of content that perform best, to improve engagement and boost return on investment (ROI).
Given that around 37% of social browsers visit a company’s social media page before purchasing a product or service, it’s vital to ensure your online presence reinforces a prospective customers’ belief in your brand.
Other benefits of a social media audit include:
- Smarter use of time and budget: By identifying what works and what doesn’t, you can focus your time and budget on high-impact social media activities.
- Stronger branding: After a thorough audit, you can ensure consistent and professional representation across all platforms.
- A competitive edge: Social media audit insights let you benchmark against competitors and spot new opportunities to take your social media strategy to another level.
How To Perform an Effective Social Media Audit
Follow these steps to perform an effective social media audit:
- Set clear social media goals
- List your social media accounts
- Analyze performance metrics
- Review your content performance
- Understand your audience
- Learn from competitors
- Summarize with an audit report
- Develop a dynamic social media plan
- Call in the experts
1. Set Clear Social Media Goals
Before starting your social media audit, you must establish what you aim to achieve. Your goals may include:
- Enhancing engagement: Increase likes, shares, and comments.
- Boosting conversions: Drive more website traffic and sales.
- Improving ROI: Optimize ad spend for better results.
- Refining content strategy: Identify what resonates with your audience.
2. List Your Social Media Accounts
List all of the platforms where your brand has a presence, including active and inactive accounts. This will give you a complete picture of your social media footprint.
Here are a few tips to guide you:
- Use a spreadsheet to track usernames, URLs, and who manages each account. Check for unauthorized accounts or imposters while your at it.
- Check each profile for completeness and consistency. It's important that your branding (logo, cover photo, bio, etc.) is uniform across all platforms. An inconsistent profile may confuse your followers and weaken your brand identity. Inconsistent expressions on social media can negatively affect a person’s or a brand’s trustworthiness, attractiveness, or authenticity, studies have shown.
- Assess the security of each account — ensure they have robust passwords, appropriate privacy settings, and two-factor authentication. Regularly updating these settings helps protect against unauthorized access and potential security breaches.
3. Analyze Performance Metrics
Start by reviewing engagement metrics on your content. Look at likes, comments, shares, retweets, pins — every type of engagement matters. These numbers will reveal what’s connecting with your audience and what isn’t.
Are you meeting your objectives for brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, and sales? If not, dig into the data using tools like Google Analytics and other platform-specific insights tools like Meta Insights and TikTok Analytics to track performance and pin down where you can improve.
4. Review Your Content Performance
Audit the types of content you post to determine what works best:
- Formats: Video, images, carousels, text posts, or stories.
- Topics: Product promotions, educational content, user-generated content, or industry trends.
- Timing: Posting frequency and optimal times for engagement.
Make sure your visuals are sharp, correctly sized, and aligned with each platform’s best practices. Ensure your main themes (e.g., educational, promotional, community-building) are properly represented. Plus, you’ll want to identify and minimize repetitive content that doesn’t add value.
5. Understand Your Audience
To properly analyze your audience, here’s how to get started:
- Group your audience into segments based on characteristics like age, gender, location, and behavior (age, gender, location, new followers vs. loyal customers, etc.).
- Think about what each group actually wants from you and tailor content accordingly.
- Use tools like Instagram Insights and X Analytics to gain detailed information about the users who engage with your posts.
- Track changes in your follower count over time to see trends and the impact of your recent campaigns.
- Look for sudden spikes or drops to identify successful strategies or potential issues.
6. Learn From Competitors
Your competitors are your best role models when running a social media audit — be sure to learn from them. Analyze what they are doing well. What can you learn from their successes and mistakes? This can provide valuable insights and inspiration for your own strategy — and it costs nothing.
Huynh Cong Tan, Founder of One Pixel Media, emphasizes the importance of this step. “Competitor analysis can reveal best practices and opportunities that you might have missed in your own strategy,” he points out.
Compare follower counts, engagement rates, and content strategies, then identify gaps and opportunities in your own approach. Use tools like Ahrefs or Rival IQ for detailed insights.
7. Summarize with an Audit Report
Document your findings and recommendations in a comprehensive report:
- Executive summary: Key takeaways and high-level insights.
- Detailed analysis: Performance metrics, content review, and audience insights.
- Recommendations: Specific steps to improve performance.
Visuals like charts, screenshots, or tables can illustrate and drive home your findings. Present your report to stakeholders and align on the next steps to take.
8. Develop a Dynamic Social Media Plan
A detailed social media marketing plan should outline your goals, target audience, content strategy, posting schedule, and metrics for success.
Here are actionable steps to develop a social media marketing plan:
- Focus on platforms where your target audience is and don’t be afraid to drop those with consistently low ROI.
- Regularly update your plan as goals evolve and new insights emerge.
- Keep an eye on social media trends to take advantage of opportunities to connect with your audience in fresh and meaningful ways. This proactive approach ensures your social media efforts remain innovative and aligned with industry best practices.
9. Call In the Experts
If this sounds overwhelming, don’t sweat it. A social media agency or consultant can help you analyze data, create a killer strategy, and keep up with ever-changing trends. Sometimes, an outside perspective makes all the difference.
Turning Your Audit Findings into Actionable Insights
Analyzing data is just the beginning of a social media audit. What you do with it is what really matters. We reached out to our Agency Directory industry experts for their tips on successfully achieving this, and here is what they shared:
1. Prioritize What Matters
Tudor Rusmanica, Head of Organic at Bigwave Marketing, highlights that “Prioritizing issues based on their impact and urgency is the next step. Not all findings will have the same level of importance, so ranking them helps focus efforts on the most critical areas first.”
For example, if you discover that a particular type of post consistently performs well, it is crucial to address this immediately to avoid wasting resources on something that just doesn’t work with your followers.
Prioritizing helps you focus your efforts on areas that have the greatest effect on your social media performance. In short, you can tackle the most critical issues first and put more energy into what works and cut what doesn’t.
2. Create SMART Recommendations
Rusmanica further shares that once you’ve prioritized your issues, you need to create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) recommendations for your social media strategy. These provide clear, actionable steps to address your audit findings.
Let’s break down each of them:
- Specific: Clearly define what needs to be done.
- Measurable: Make sure that you can track your progress and measure outcomes.
- Achievable: Set realistic goals that can be accomplished with the resources available.
- Relevant: Align the actions and recommendations to your business objectives.
- Time-bound: Set up deadlines for when the actions should be completed.
3. Decide What Тo Post
Aditya Roy, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at XAXs Corps, shares advice on how to turn social media audit findings into insights: “Social media audit can be turned into three core actionable insights: which type of posts to reduce posting, which type of posts to increase posting, and which type of new posts to start posting.”
Building on this valuable tip, your audit findings should lead to identifying and reducing the frequency of content that consistently underperforms. This can help you allocate more resources to more effective content types.
Busting Common Myths About Social Media Audits
Despite all its benefits, social media audits can often be misunderstood in a few ways:
- Myth #1: It’s just marketing fluff
- Myth #2: Tracking social media is a breeze
- Myth #3: It’s all just numbers
Myth #1: It’s Just Marketing “Fluff”
Some people believe that social media audits are just marketing “fluff.” But the opposite is true: they actually provide valuable insights that can drive growth and engagement and significantly improve your metrics and ROI.
According to Rusmanica, “Small and medium-sized businesses can greatly benefit from regular social media audits, as they provide valuable insights that can drive growth and engagement, allowing them to take advantage of strategies that have already proven to work for other larger companies.”
“It's especially critical for businesses that don't have a lot of marketing budget and can't afford to hire very creative or experienced staff,” he concludes.
Myth #2: Tracking Social Media is a Breeze
Another common misconception is that tracking social media performance is simple. Bryan Philips, Head of Marketing at In Motion Marketing, highlights an often-overlooked aspect of tracking: “The concept of Dark Social, where people share content through private channels like messaging apps and email, complicates tracking as these interactions are not captured by traditional analytics tools.”
Interpreting data requires a deep understanding of social media metrics and analyzing them in the context of your business goals, audience behavior, and industry benchmarks. A thoughtful, strategic approach is necessary to turn raw data into actionable insights that improve your social media strategy.
Myth#3: It’s All Just Numbers
Some people also think that social media audits merely look at platform insights with little to no inherent meaning. While analytics are a large part of analyzing social media performance, they provide an important jumping-off point to improve your content and overall strategy.
Aditya Roy concludes that: “A social media audit is digging deeper and finding the underlying issues and patterns that can be acted on.”
Social Media Audit FAQs
1. How often should I conduct a social media audit?
It is recommended to conduct a social media audit at least once a year, but quarterly audits can provide more timely insights. If your strategy is evolving quickly or you're running multiple campaigns, checking in more often is a good idea in order to stay on track and catch issues before they snowball.
2. How long does a social media audit take?
The duration can vary based on the number of social media accounts and the depth of analysis. A comprehensive audit can take a few days to a couple of weeks. If you're working with a large team or gathering input from multiple stakeholders, it might take a little longer—but it's worth the time to get it right.
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