How to conduct a successful social media audit [+Free template]

If you use social media to promote your business, you should know how to do a social media audit.

Don’t be alarmed—a social media audit isn’t quite as frightening as it may appear. However, it is essential to create or maintain an efficient social media marketing strategy.

An audit of your social media accounts will assist you in figuring out what’s going on in each one.

At a glance, you’ll be able to see: Which outdated profiles do you need to resurrect, reuse, or shut down fresh chances to expand and engage your audience?

Now, you must be wondering what a social media audit is?

This guide has all you need to know about it.

What is a social media audit?

The word “audit” might be intimidating. However, it has nothing to do with the tax authorities in this situation. Instead, Social Media Audit simply entails gathering crucial information from all of your social network profiles in one location.

A social media audit paints a clear picture of your present social media efforts and identifies the most effective ways to improve them. When you’re done, you’ll have a single strategy document for all of your social media channels, complete with crucial details.

A comprehensive process of analyzing the social media presence of any entity is called a social media audit. In other words, a social media audit means tracking, measuring, and analyzing the performance of social media profiles. 

These profiles can belong to any type of business brand, organization, or individual.

Some of the common metrics analyzed and tracked in a social media audit are:

• Post impressions
• Views
• Comments
• Likes/reactions 
• Shares
• Other forms of interaction can vary from platform to platform.

The overall result of such analysis is useful in determining the target audience, demographics, engagement, and suitable social media strategies to build a strong social media presence. 

Example of a social media audit

Let’s take the example of  Xiaomi, a popular Chinese electronics manufacturing company mainly known for selling smartphones, to understand better what a social media audit is. The brand has a strong social media presence across all major platforms. 

Xiaomi’s social media profiles have amassed a huge following, which shows that the brand is certainly at the top of its social media game. However, a careful look at these profiles shows that there are some inconsistencies that the brand can certainly overcome with the help of regular social media audits. 

Auditing these profiles reveals the following things:

• The company has varying official handles. For instance, “Xiaomi Official” on TikTok and on Pinterest and Instagram are simply ‘Xiaomi.’ It can confuse the audience, especially when trying to find the official social media page. 
• The brand defined itself as an ‘internet company’ on Facebook and a ‘technology company’ on X, so there are branding inconsistencies. 
• The upcoming ‘Xiaomi Fan Festival’ is not being promoted equally on every platform. Hence, it can lose out on reaching a significant audience, such as Gen Z, who mostly use Instagram and TikTok.

This is a basic example of a manual social media audit. In the later sections, we’ll dive into the detailed types and examples of social media audits, so keep reading!

Why conduct a social media audit?

An audit answers various questions about a company’s interaction with its online audience.

•  Is it true that having a Twitter account attracts new customers?
•  Is it true that the Facebook page saves past posts?

 An audit can realign any online profiles that aren’t following a company’s marketing plan or signal that they need to be discarded.

An audit can also help you determine which marketing strategies are working and which ones need to be tweaked. The findings can be utilized to help businesses plan future campaigns and conduct subsequent audits.

Benefits and Importance of Social Media Audit 

A social media audit is essential for a social media strategy with a strong return on investment.

Many businesses overlook it as a crucial step, and as a result, they lose more money than they should through their social media marketing efforts.

There are various compelling reasons to do a social media audit, including the following:

•  Examine your campaign’s execution to see where it falls short.
•  You’ll be in a better position to enhance your execution if you understand its flaws and strengths.
•  Discovering opportunities would have been overlooked if a social media audit had not been performed.
•  Providing a favorable image of your brand to your prospects and customers.
•  Determining what elements affect the core conversion rate and analyzing the success and failure of your social media campaign in terms of conversions.
•  Knowing where you stand concerning your competitors can start employing strategies that they are overlooking.

A social media audit provides you with a level of clarity that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It serves as a fantastic beginning point for improvement and removes any immediate roadblocks that may have been impeding your campaign’s progress.

A social media audit, like a major house cleaning project, makes your campaign cleaner and smarter.

Yes, carrying it out needs some work. 

However, in the end, it will enable you to make a slew of little adjustments that will only serve to improve your social media marketing plan on a larger scale.

As a result, you’ll be able to create a favorable return on your investment in the long run.

How to conduct a social media audit? (Step by step Guide)

Download ContentStudio’s free social media audit template immediately if you plan to start working on your audit as you read this piece. This gives you a simple, well-organized location to keep track of the information you uncover during each audit process.

Step #1: Locate all of your social media profiles

You may believe you can recall all your social media profiles from memory. But, are you certain? Begin by making a list of all the accounts you and your team use regularly. But don’t assume that’s all you need to know.

For example, there could be old profiles built before your organization had a social strategy. Perhaps these were discarded at some stage.

Perhaps your company’s many divisions use social media, but there is no centralized system or list of accounts. You’ll need to perform some legwork to fully audit the social media accounts associated with your organization.

Where to find this info:

• Search the web. Begin by Googling your company name and the names of your items to see what social media accounts pop up.

If you encounter accounts you don’t recognize, look into them to see if they’re linked to your organization. Are they fan accounts, if not? Impostor accounts managed by people who aren’t linked with your company?

• Search social networks Following your Google search, go to each of the major social media platforms and search for your brand and product names directly to see if any unexpected profiles pop up.

• Make a list of all the relevant accounts you come across. Make a note of any accounts that require more investigation. For example, you might not be able to tell if the account was created by someone from your organization or by an impostor.
• Make a note of all unowned accounts in your audit document, as well as the procedures you took to close them down. Begin by contacting each account holder individually, as there could be a simple misunderstanding or an instance of a genuine fan going too far. However, if you cannot manage the situation on your own, be prepared to turn to social media for assistance.
• Set up a social media monitoring campaign to keep an eye out for any new impostor accounts that may surface in the future; after you’re sure that you’ve found all of the relevant accounts, delete the application.

It is also an excellent opportunity to look for social networks where you don’t yet have a presence. Then you may decide whether or not to include them in your social media plan.

Are you a TikTok user? What do you think of Nextdoor? Is it Byte or Bit? All of these tools aren’t required. However, you should jot down some ideas for future projects and save your business username for any sites you don’t currently have an account on.

Step #2: Determine what content is important

The fundamental goal of a social media audit is to uncover and repeat content that resonates with your target audience. Because everyone utilizes slightly different analytics, comparing posts from different channels may not be easy.

Begin by creating a project.

In the project creation wizard, type in your predefined keywords. The social media listening tool will begin collecting any mentions of your keywords on the internet.

Finding it difficult to come up with the proper keywords to track? Consider your business name, your branded hashtag, or the name of your product or service.

Because most social media listening tools don’t collect historical data, allow it a couple of days to acquire enough data.

In the Analysis tab, you’ll find the most significant information.

Brand24 will examine the mentions and provide you with data on:

•  The most well-known authors
•  The most often mentioned items
•  Estimated social media reach Interaction on social media Likes on social media
•  Comments on social media

And there are plenty more! The filters are in the right upper corner, and you may use them to divide the results by the social platform you want to audit.

Taking a closer look at your referral networks is also crucial when performing a good social media audit. It is simple to perform with Google Analytics’ Acquisition tab.

Step #3: Update Your Bio

 Visitors to your social media site should be able to get a short overview of who you are and what you do by reading your bio. It’s the ideal location for a branded or campaign hashtag, as well as a link to additional brand accounts (a good idea for global brands).

Stitch Fix is a great example of both:

With a branded hashtag and connections to other brand accounts, here’s an example of an Instagram bio.

Make it brief and sweet when crafting your social network bio, especially for Twitter and Instagram. These are fantastic places to use emojis, have a little fun, or add a little edginess to your product or service descriptions.

Patagonia, for example, employs significantly fewer characters than Instagram’s character limit for a simple but strong message:

You have a little more room to delve into detail on Facebook and LinkedIn, and company sites tend to be more professional in tone

Finally, double-check the URL of the website you’re connecting to in your bio. Because you can’t link from posts on Instagram, “link in bio” terminology is commonly used to promote certain campaigns, products, or landing pages. However, it’s simple to forget to return to your default homepage.

Step #4: Open up your social media analytics

It’s time to dig into the data now that you know which profiles you’re inspecting and what metrics you’re searching for.

This is where you’ll be able to see if you’re on track or if there’s still space for improvement.

It’s worth noting that using a social media analytics platform like ContentStudio can help you pull your metrics faster and keep them all in one place.

The recommended metrics to look at to determine the performance of your profiles are outlined in our template. Engagement, link clicks, shares, referral traffic, impressions, and other metrics are included.

Step #5: Include public relations, SEO, and PPC in the audit

Dehydration and the loss of good nutrients to a social media marketing plan result from living behind closed walls in the social media marketing room.

A social media strategy that includes public relations, search, and PPC will provide depth, optimization, and important content.

Combining marketing agendas creates a sense of synchronization and adds company goals and objectives to social media planning.

Step #6: Analyze channel performance

In this stage, rather than looking at the performance of individual postings, you’ll record the channel’s overall performance.

Now is the time to write a mission statement and a few key goals for each social account if you haven’t already.

After all, evaluating your performance is impossible if you don’t know what kind of performance you’re aiming for. For example, you wouldn’t analyze the performance of a Twitter account primarily for customer service and an Instagram account attempting to increase follower engagement using the same criteria.

Your goal statement should identify the important indicators to examine for each social channel.

Website traffic and conversions are important metrics to track for most brands. After all, while social media participation is good, the actual return on investment occurs when followers transform into prospects or customers.

Step #7: Audit Your social media template

The significance of social media interaction cannot be emphasized, especially if others are already conversing with you! Interact with your fans to encourage favorable word of mouth.

Your social media audit should start with a policy evaluation of your answer templates and rules. This review should include information such as:

• Who is in charge of replying to your brand’s social media posts?
• Do you use emojis, GIFs, or photos? What kind are you talking about?
• When an event needs to be escalated, who should intervene?

Ensure you have a real-time alerting mechanism in place in case of a disaster.

ContentStudio’s Free Social Media Audit Template

As you can see, an audit entails a lot of detective work, so having a place to store your findings is essential.

A spreadsheet is the easiest approach to keep track of all the information you’ll find during your audit.

For your convenience, we’ve designed a social media audit template.

Download Template

You can use a program like Excel or Google Docs to make your spreadsheet if you prefer. You should keep track of the following information for each social media account:

Account details

• Your social media handle 
• The URL to your Instagram profile 
• The account’s bio text any hashtags that appear in your bio or your posts regularly
• The URL in your bio that you connect to
• If your account has been verified, the internal person or team in charge of the account (sometimes referred to as the “owner”—for example, the social marketing team)
• A declaration of the account’s mission (for example, to promote company culture using employee photos or to provide customer service during office hours)
• Information about the current pinned post (if applicable)
• Date of a most recent post (to aid in the identification of underutilized/abandoned accounts)

Performance details

• Total number of posts published
• Total number of engagements, engagement rate, click-throughs, and so on
• Change in engagement (optional)
• Campaign ROI the top three posts in terms of engagement

Audience details

• Important demographic data
• The total number of audience i.e. followers
• Changes in the number of followers

Objectives

• Set 2-3 SMART goals for your next audit.
• Include a column for any account-related remarks.

Done with the Audit? What next?

Your social media audit spreadsheet should now be complete. After that, it’s time to put everything you’ve learned into practice.

To accomplish so, specialists usually divide work into two categories:

Look at the Big Picture or go for a Quick Win?

In the spreadsheet, there will be a column where you may write ‘Quick Win’ or ‘Big Picture Win’ next to each item:

Quick Wins should be the first port of call for any action plan. These types of jobs should be listed in the spreadsheet’s ‘Running Notes’ tab. Updating outdated branding on profiles.

For example, or ensuring that the correct bio links are in place.

After that, seek some ‘Big Picture Wins.’

Consider the following:

• Your social media marketing objectives
• Changes to your plan that will help you reach those objectives

The findings of your audit will be extremely specific to your brand. When it comes to Big Picture Wins, though, you should start by looking for repeatable tactics that can help you reach your overall objectives.

Social Media Audit in a nutshell

A social media audit doesn’t have to be complex or time-consuming. If you follow the procedures outlined in this article, you may be able to complete yours in as little as 30 minutes.

Every social media platform gives you the data and insights you need to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy and communicate with your target audience in their native tongue.

Preparation and organization are key components of a successful audit. That is when a simple spreadsheet comes in handy.

You’ll want to keep track of whether these numbers increase or decrease over time. Then you can make conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.

You’ll want to keep track of whether these numbers increase or decrease over time. Then you’ll be able to determine what works and what doesn’t. Also, make a schedule for your audits. You can do them once a week, once a month, or once a quarter.

Don’t be scared to branch out and try new social media platforms. These can be included in your next audit and you may start developing an understanding of their algorithms.

Set goals based on the information you’ve gathered, and your social media accounts will steadily develop over time.