How to Conduct a Social Media Audit

Introduction

A social media audit is important to analyse how you can grow and optimize your presence online. A comprehensive audit will provide insight into your brand’s performance on each social media outlet and will allow you to analyse overall analytics, review profile uniformity and policies, and identify audience engagement and interactions. Why should you know how to do a social media audit for your business? Audits will help uncover growth opportunities, gaps in your marketing channels, and ensure your brand messaging is consistent and hitting at the right audience.

So, how do you complete a social media audit? Start by developing a list of your organization’s active and inactive social profiles, which may include smaller or overlooked sites. Follow this by examining the uniformity within your brand, and completeness of your profiles/links – are bios, links, and visuals up to date?

Next, look at your analytics and your performance amongst the metrics – engagement, follower growth, impressions, and click-through rates. Which types of posts and what type of content perform best? Which one of your platforms is bringing in the most traffic? Finally, you can benchmark against your competitors and industry standards using this modified set of tools to give you actional goals for optimization. In conclusion, completing an audit will be of value when learning how to operationalize social matter of deed.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit is an in-depth examination of your business’s social media accounts as well as the performance of those accounts. A social media audit helps you understand how your profiles and content are performing on social media and whether they align with your marketing goals. This involves taking stock of your social profiles, analyzing performance metrics and key indicators such as engagement, reach, and follower growth, and reviewing the outcome that individual campaigns have had across each social platform.

Being able to do a social media audit process step by step simply helps set clear expectations about the metrics you are measuring and the frequency of conducting it normally quarterly or biannually. You as either the owner or manager of your social media accounts are in fact determining your social media presence, identifying internal strengths and weaknesses, and allowing for growth and changes as a result of the Social media audit, thus making your social media practices more data driven.

Gather Your Social Media Profiles

The first step in the process is a thorough collection of all your social media profiles. This inventory should look at your active and inactive profiles, official and unofficial accounts associated with your brand. Why is this important?

• It keeps your brand consistent, meaning that you show all social profiles with the right logos, bios, and how to contact you.
• You may discover inactive profiles that confuse users, or it opens you to other security risks.
• You can confirm whether the accounts are verified and who has access to manage them.

Begin with a list of every profile using a spreadsheet or an audit template. Provide details about the platform names, URLs, follower counts, last post-dates, and verified status for every account you document. This list will be your master list and will be the basis of your entire social media audit, while also helping you keep your brand on point across all your channels.

Sprout Social writes that monitoring accounts and/or cleaning up dead accounts regularly significantly improves a brand’s online presence and digital reputation. When your documents are well-organized, it makes the social media audit less overwhelming and allows it to become a manageable, calculated step toward improved marketing performance.

Review Branding and Profile Completeness

In a social media audit focusing on brand and profile completeness, you will want to start with one account at a time. Review each account and assess whether or not your profile pictures, cover photos, bio, and contact info all align with your brand’s messaging and visual identity. Login and examine if your bios and information are completely up-to-date, simple, and precise and that they reflect whatever your marketing message is at the time. Check that your handle(s) and usernames are consistent on all platforms to avoid confusion and develop brand recognition.

• Are your logos and visual consistent on all channels?
• Are your bios and/or descriptions written in your brand’s tone and voice?
• Are your URLs, contact details, and calls to actions are current and aligned?

Furthermore, look into whether they have a verified account signified by a blue checkmark—this helps to build trust if it’s applicable to your industry.  Also, examine the pinned posts to ensure they are promoting your most timely offers or campaigns. Consistency in your brand represents that your account is credible & can be trusted online while helping to portray a level of professionalism and trustworthiness in the digital space.

Analyze Metrics and Performance

Analyzing metrics & performance is one of the most important aspects of your social media audit process. Understanding what type of content resonates with your audience and tracking your social media key performance indicators can help you navigate how you want to modify your strategy to improve results. Focus on the engagement rate, reach/impressions, and clicks of your content that shows your overall social media performance.

• Engagement rate shows you how much your audience interacts with your content—likes, comments, shares, and saves are some indicators.
• Reach/Impressions shows you how many people saw your content and how often they saw it.
• Click-through rate (CTR) measures how many were users clicked through on your posts/links—this reflects how relevant or effective the content was.
• Follower trends will allow you to identify growth opportunities or issues on specific channels.

Staying on top of analytics and metrics helps you gain an understanding of your performance, but it is sometimes useful to reference a reputable third-party platform; while many social media accounts have built in analytics, those platforms build on additional insights by longitudinally compiling data (i.e., Sprout Social, HubSpot). It is preferable to do a monthly or quarterly deep dive to track performance and allow you to analyze trends and your return on investment (ROI).

Evaluate Content Strategy

The content strategy aspect is important to consider when conducting a social media audit. The assessment will provide clarity on what content types gain the most traction, and what content may need to be improved or cease production.

• Identifying your most successful content type: Are you getting more engagement off of videos than you are photos or carousels?
• Consider your frequency: Are you posting at regular intervals that there are no gaps? How does frequency impact audience engagement?
• Examine your topics and messaging: Which topics or content pillars are driving the most engagement?
• Consider your visual and tonal consistency: Is your content representative of your brand identity and platforms?

Ask yourself:

• Which type of content is my audience engaging with the most?
• Is there a type of content that doesn’t seem to perform and should be revisited?
• Does my posting schedule align with when my audience is most active?

With analytics both from the native and third-party tools, you will want to establish a content strategy to amplify the things that work and adjust or remove what is not working to maintain a current and relevant social media presence to support your organization’s goals.

Understand Audience Insights

A crucial factor in conducting a social media audit is understanding your audience, which means you to go beyond counting followers and gain understanding of their demographics, behaviours, & preferences.

You will want to start by looking at audience demographics such as age, gender, location, & interests. Does your audience match your target market? For instance, maybe your target market are millennial kids, yet your majority of followers are older adults. Time to adjust.

Consider these key points:

• How do you analyze audience behaviours? Meaning at what time do they tend to be most active? What type of content do they find most appealing?
• Segment audience profiles into personas to create messages resonating with them.
• Use the native tools available in Facebook Insights &/or Instagram Analytics, as well as third-party tools for deeper psychographic insights.

Ask yourself: Are you reaching the right people?

When you can connect your audience to what they like, content & campaigns, you will receive engagement and potentially form a community of loyal customers. When you apply a data-driven process of understanding your audience, you have completed a necessary step for ongoing successful social media marketing.

Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is an important part of how to conduct a social media audit. It is the act of taking stock of your brand’s performance on the various social media platforms you take part in, with other key competitors, to see where you are strong, weak, & positioned for growth.

To begin, determine who your competitors are in the social media space—both direct and indirect. Expand the lens of competitors to the brands that are also trying to gain your audience’s mindshare, not just brands that sell a similar product. (In this case, consider competitors as any brand trying to get your audience’s attention.)

Key benchmarking areas include:

• Audience growth: Are your competitors proving to gain followers quicker than you?
• Engagement: How many likes, comments, and the rate in which they are being shared?
• Post frequency and content formats: What content types are they prioritizing on social?
• Social share of voice: What percentage of the conversations in your industry are you (the brand) owning in relation to your competitors?

Sprout Social has a Competitor Performance Report with tailored insights of your interactions across social platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, and X (formally Twitter). This report can aid you to quantify how effective you are compared to your competitors on social media.

Benchmarks aren’t simply quantitative data, remember to look at the qualitative attributes like tone, brand persona, and the length of time to respond back to comments for additional positions to gain a competitive advantage.

Benchmarking allows you to:

• Discover gaps in your content and/or content frequency
• Recognize tactics by competitors that are performing well, including Hashtag usage and interactive content
• Get an understanding of which social channels provide you a best opportunity to leverage growth

Finally, make use of automation tools (Sprout Social, BuzzSumo, Social Blade) to collect data directly—and visualize your competitive landscape, factually inspire next steps, and formulate them into sound plans of action to round out your digital and market share.

Identify Gaps and Areas for Improvement

After collecting data and assessing your social media performance, the next step involves highlighting where you see gaps, and determining where you can improve upon that performance. This step is particularly important for improving social media performance, ensuring you will spend your time on initiatives that will improve your performance.

Begin by summarizing your findings:

• Note any content types and tactics that performed well to either replicate or scale.
• Note any content types or platforms that performed poorly due to low engagement and reach.
• Note any instances where your brands messaging or creative did not transfer to other channels.

Consider these common gaps:

• Any content types that might be missed, as desired by audiences (e.g. videos, IG stories, polls, etc.)
• An inadequate posting schedule or timing that impacted engagement.
• A lack of Calls-to-Actions and user engagement on content.

After you have identified the gaps and areas of weakness, create the action checklist for improvement. For example:

• Increase posting frequency based upon the best-performing content types.
• Adjust your messaging to be more in line with the audience personas.
• Modify your creative visuals in alignment to the brands visual identity.
• Post at different times to improve reach and engagement.

Tools like Sprout Social, or Canva Templates, can help you put together your action items into an actionable social media audit report. Also, be sure to audit your social media regularly, and take action as this will ensure continual growth and better ROI.

Create an Action Plan

After completing your social media audit, the final and most important step is to develop a clear action plan. This plan turns your audit findings into strategic steps with measurable goals.

After you complete your social media audit, the last tip and most important step is a concise action plan. An action plan is how you make your audit results actionable through specific next steps & goals that are measurable.

• To start developing your action plan, summarize the key insights from your social media audit:
• Identify what is working well that should be continued or scaled?
• Identify critical gaps or areas that are underperforming that should be addressed?

Next, you will want to develop detailed specific recommendations, for example:

• Consider updating or deleting inactive or irrelevant accounts
• Refine content strategy based on your best-performing content formats
• Adjust posting frequency & timing based on best opportunity to generate engagement
• Enhance brand consistency across all profiles
• Consider implementing, or enhancing tracking for KPIs to track & review moving forward

Develop a schedule of follow-ups & checkpoints to assess your plan & make adjustments. You could consider using some tools such as a social media content calendar to assess, organize and simplify scheduling and/or posting your content.

Ultimately, the success of any social media marketing program is continuous improvement based on available data. Ongoing audit and action planning will enable you to optimize content strategy, engage and increase ROI over time.

Tools to Use

Once you are focusing on how to conduct a social media audit effectively, finding the right tools becomes one of the biggest game-changers. Here are some of the best platforms and templates that make your audit process that much more efficient:

Sprout Social

A premier management tool that has robust multi-channel analytics, competitor benchmarking, social listening, and customizable reporting abilities. It makes it easy to track KPIs, engagement with your audience(s), and content impact across channels (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.). Sprout Social can help audit your paid and organic campaigns for better ROI.

Rival IQ

This is the leading tool where social media audit (of competitors) and benchmarking is concerned, using AI to report on performance shifts related to content trends and boosted posts. Rival IQ living dashboards consolidate data from multiple user profiles for the audited period and lets you create audit reports that you can export and customize later. It covers Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (X), and YouTube.

Hootsuite

While its known for its scheduling ability, it is built with analytic features to also measure reach, engagement, and follower growth against competitors. It includes benchmarking and real-time sentiment analysis and allows you to create social media audit reports from multiple platforms.

Socialinsider

Good analytics and social share of voice benchmarker with reporting export options and optimizations for content scheduling. Supports Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter.

Google Analytics

This isn’t a “social media tool” but it can be integrated with your social profiles to track referral traffic, conversions, and cross-channel performance, which can provide the overall ROI for your audit.

Each of these resources provides templates, visual dashboards, and the option to export data to streamline your auditing process. Ultimately, it’s down to the size of your business, your budget, and your audit requirements to determine the tools that are best for you. Yet, the best approach for a comprehensive social media audit to track content, audience & competitors is to utilize multiple tools.

How Often Should You Conduct a Social Media Audit?

So how often should you be auditing your social media? People will advise you to conduct a thorough social media audit, every quarter or three months, is best practice. Three months typically provides you enough data to adequately gauge accurately gauge real trends and adjustment time. Additionally, an audit quarterly offers consistent assessment and enables you to modify your social media plan to support current business goals & audience interests.

However, some businesses may complete a bi-annual social media audit if their social media endeavors or campaigns are not active, or resources only allow for audits on every 6 months. Alternatively, in the event your organization frequently launches campaigns, is in the midst of rebranding, or analytics are suddenly low in engagement, then auditing once a month or after each campaign, would be a reasonable approach to quickly assess opportunities for consideration / adjustments.

Auditing your social media consistently ensures your presence is competitive & optimized. Industry reports indicate brands that regularly conduct audits achieve a 27% year-over-year increase in engagement confirming the relevance of providing ongoing assessments.

In summary:

• Most brands are ready to perform audits every quarter, in order to balance insight with actionable next steps.
• Stable & lower activity brands may want to run their audits twice a year.
• Brands that are fast-starting or under pressure may choose to audit per month or may choose to audit based on a specific campaign.

Choose the interval that best fits your company size, brand goals, & campaign speed, and discover the potential benefits of your social media audit.

Conclusion

Performing a Social Media Audit is a powerful practice for aligning your SEO & social strategies to inform data-driven marketing with content/the marketing strategies that wins on social or help drive and reinforce long-term branding. By regularly reflecting on your social profiles, analyzing data, & comparing against competitors, you gain insightful action steps to continually enhance performance. However, the key to success is retention of that performance using regular audits, recording progress, and integrating learnings into your evolving strategy to stay ahead of your competition in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

For businesses being distracted by the complexity of managing multiple branded platforms, the AGTC team would take on expert management of your social profiles. AGTC would manage your social media audit, optimization and implementation & allows you to focus on your goal as the CEO: continuing to grow your brand/fund.

If you want to be sure your social presence is always optimized & aligned with your brand goals, you would trust AGTC to manage your social media profiles.

FAQ

1. What is a social media audit and why is it important?

A social media audit is a systemized assessment of your social media presence that determines your opportunities and challenges so you can tweak your marketing strategy, enhance content relevance, and make your brand consistent across all platforms.

2. How often should I conduct a social media audit?

While a quarterly audit is ideal to gain insights and take timely actions, an audit every few weeks will allow you to make or assess changes for activations that run quickly. A quarterly audit will work for social media that remains static.

3. What key metrics should I analyse during a social media audit?

Metrics such as engagement, reach, and follower growth can tell you about audience interest and content effectiveness. Click-through and conversion rates show the impact that social media has on business objectives.

4. How do I conduct a competitive social media audit?

Use benchmarking tools to find data on your competition, including their audience size, engagement rate, and content strategy, so that you can compare and identify best practice strategies and market gaps.

5. What tools are best for conducting a social media audit?

Tools such as Sprout Social and Rival IQ have offerings that provide in-depth analytics and competitive insights. Google Analytics can anticipate social media contribution by analyzing website traffic and conversions as a medium.