Ideally, your social media strategy should always be based on hard facts and data. That is why regularly auditing your performance on social is essential for staying on top of your game and creating realistic, attainable social media goals.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about social media audits, how you can use them to create a roadmap for growth, and of course, the key steps required to perform an audit for your brand’s social media accounts.
To make things even easier, we’ve included a FREE social media audit template for you to copy, edit and use.
So, buckle up and let's dive right in!
Table of Contents
What is a social media audit?
Why is it important to perform a social media audit?
How to conduct a social media audit?
Social media audit checklist
Social media audit template
Social media audit report example
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is the process of regularly examining the metrics of a brand’s performance across multiple social media channels. Think of it as a report card that you fill in every month or quarter, to help you measure and analyze your social media marketing strategy.
A social media audit report is meant to guide you and your team in optimizing your content strategy, which is why it is crucial to do it as regularly as possible.
And since each channel needs its own content strategy, social media audits should cover a vast amount of data, so you can track multiple audit metrics and understand what posts perform best in terms of topics and format.
Before we dive into the how, let’s first understand why it is so important to create a social media audit report in the first place.
Why is it important to perform a social media audit?
Managing multiple social media channels without a clear roadmap can be tricky. It’s like you're steering a ship through stormy seas without a compass.
It's chaotic and uncertain, and you're bound to veer off course. Similarly, without a social media audit, you're essentially sailing blind, unaware of your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.
Here's why you should make social media auditing part of your monthly or quarterly reporting routine.
To evaluate performance
If you’re asking yourself “what is the primary objective of a social audit?”, the answer is usually to measure performance.
An audit typically serves to show you the impact different types of social media content have on your brand metrics. When you audit social media platforms separately, you can identify not only what's working well but also what's falling flat.
To better understand your audience
Your audience is at the heart of your social media presence. By analyzing demographics, social media engagement, and in-depth feedback through social listening, you gain invaluable insights into who your audience is and what resonates with them.
To prove social media ROI
Are your social media efforts aligned with your overall business objectives, and are they contributing towards a higher social media ROI?
Learning how to do a social media audit can help you prove that you’re focusing your efforts on the right platforms and/or right type of content, or on the contrary, can reveal that you should be tweaking your strategy to produce better results.
To spot trends and opportunities
The social media landscape is ever-changing. A brand audit enables you to identify emerging trends, new platforms, content gaps and untapped opportunities that help you stay ahead of the curve and outperform your competitors.
To stay competitive
Social media competitor analysis is a major part of any brand’s audit. Regular audits keep you competitive by benchmarking your performance against industry standards and keeping you informed about what your competitors are up to.
When creating a social media strategy, my process is to first complete an audit of the content and accounts, so I have a detailed understanding of what’s performed well and what type of audience the content has attracted.
Then, I compare this to our goal audience/target customers. If it aligns, then the strategy process is to build on existing high-performing content themes.
If it’s not quite hitting the mark, include more competitor research and look for trends in the demographics that we’re trying to attract. – Jo Loughlin
In essence, to audit social media content is to perform a health checkup for your brand’s online presence. It not only highlights areas of strength but also uncovers hidden opportunities for growth and improvement. So, if you're ready to steer your social media ship toward smooth, clear waters, it's time to dive into the audit process.
How to conduct a social media audit?
Running an audit of your social media presence might sound complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right roadmap and tools, you can navigate the process with confidence and ease, and uncover valuable social media insights that will help you focus your efforts on what matters most.
Without further ado, here’s how you should go about your auditing process.
#1. Round up your social channels and define objectives for each one
When conducting a social media audit, the first step is usually to list all your active social media platforms. Whether your brand is present on one, two or five channels, during an audit you must take inventory of all your social media profiles – no matter the follower count or how long ago you published your last post.
Once you have an updated record of all your active social media platforms, it’s time to create or revisit your objectives for each one. Whether you aim to increase brand awareness or community engagement, grow your audience or attract more traffic to your site, a social media audit is the perfect opportunity to reevaluate your expectations and set new goals.
Setting the appropriate goals for each platform will also help you focus your efforts and track the right metrics. For instance, if you plan to boost your brand awareness on TikTok, then tracking the total number of views your posts get is a wonderful place to start.
Don’t expect to experience growth across all social media metrics. Focus your attention on those metrics that align with your goals and track their growth across time to see if you’re doing it right or you need to improve your strategy to achieve better results.
#2. Check if your branding is consistent across all platforms
When you’re trying to create or maintain a recognizable brand identity, consistency is key. This means that your brand’s profile and banner images, bios (profile descriptions) and hashtags should be similar across all social channels.
As a side note, this also means you should be using the same brand colors and fonts for all your brand social media content.
You might be tempted to overlook this type of details, but they are actually important (and a key part of learning how to do social media audit).
Imagine one of your Facebook followers wants to connect with your brand on Instagram. They search for your profile, but they don't spot your profile picture among the search results, so they assume you're inactive on that platform and end up missing out on your Instagram content entirely.
It would be a pity to miss out on new potential followers and the chance to build up your brand reputation just because you forgot to update your profile picture or bio.
To avoid this kind of situation, make it a priority to check if your social media branding is consistent and make any changes necessary. If your company goes through a process of rebranding, make sure to update all existent brand assets to reflect the new visual identity.
#3. Dive deeper into social media analytics
Okay, so you’ve rounded up all your social media channels, set new goals or updated existing ones and check your branding consistency. Now it’s time to have a closer look at your actual performance on social media.
An important part of learning how to perform an audit on social media is mastering social media analytics.
As we mentioned before, it’s recommended that you focus only on the metrics that align with your social media goals. Otherwise, your social audits will be unnecessarily long and crowded with data that you won’t use.
There is, of course, more than one way to look at social media analytics.
On the one hand, you can take each platform individually, track its performance and see if the content you’ve shared has had the desired impact. This is what’s called a micro approach to social media measurement.
You could do this manually with pen and paper or a ready-made social media template like the one we prepared for you. But a smarter way to go about it is to use a dedicated social media audit software such as Socialinsider to automate this process and help you see more data at a glance.
By simply adding your brand’s profile into our tool, you can check your progress across all the metrics that matter to you.
For the example shown below, I chose a 6-month range, but you can of course customize that part based on how frequently you audit your content. If you’re focused on a specific area, like engagement, simply navigate to that tab for a more detailed look at your brand’s growth, engagement-wise.
A granular analysis helps you catch even the smallest shifts in brand performance, and makes it easier for you to make correlations between multiple metrics. This approach works best for regular audits (monthly or quarterly) but its efficiency diminishes as the time between audits increases, as longer gaps make it harder to pinpoint certain trends or correlations in your data.
On the other hand, you can try a much broader, macro-style look at your brand’s performance.
This means looking at brand-level metrics across multiple social media channels. This helps you figure out if your overall social media strategy is working, and if your brand as a whole is headed in the right direction.
The best approach is a mix of both.
If you're ever unsure about what to include in a social media audit, always start with your social media data. There’s no better way to analyze your performance and figure out what you need to improve than by looking at how your numbers change and grow based on the content you share and the interactions that you have with your brand followers.
#4. Identify your best-performing content for each channel
Once you’ve collected your data, you can start identifying what type of content performs best for each active brand channel.
Does your audience prefer long videos or Shorts on YouTube? Are Reels or carousels the biggest driver of engagement on Instagram? Do people resonate more with your behind-the-scenes content, or with high-production polished videos?
These are the kind of questions you should be answering during a content audit.
Here’s where a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider comes in handy, again. With Socialinsider you easily spot the top performing post type on each platform, or simply filter posts by a specific metric to see which ones come up first.
Try to understand what most if not all your best performing posts have in common. Is it the time of posting, a specific format (video, image, carousels etc), is it a hashtag? The secret to conducting a successful social media content audit is to look for similarities between your best posts and uncover patterns.
For instance, if you find that your audience engagement skyrockets when you post Reels in the afternoon, then that’s a sign you should prioritize posting such content in the future and try to maintain the same posting schedule.
If, on the other hand, you discover that the company-culture videos you’ve shared on LinkedIn are not making a splash, then it might be time to retire them and replace them with a more appealing type of content. Or simply switch up the content format.
For example, our recent LinkedIn benchmarks show that multi-image posts generate the highest engagement on this platform.
If you’ve been sharing product updates in plain text posts and they don’t seem to generate much interest among your followers, it might be time to switch things up! Try presenting your updates as multi-image posts to better capture your audience’s attention and drive more interaction.
Before creating the social media strategy, the audit of each social media page comes with it because every social media site has its sweet spot. With that audit comes a clear understanding of where the business stands and how each social media platform will help achieve its goals. – Maria Olawumi
#5. Gather insights on your audiences
When performing a social media content audit, you need to look beyond your own posts and learn as much as you possibly can about your audiences. Part of learning how to do an audit of social media activity is to turn your gaze to your community.
The first thing to keep in mind, obvious as it may be, is that your audience is not the same everywhere you post. Chances are, not the same people will watch your TikToks AND engage with your text posts on LinkedIn. There will always be overlaps, sure, but in general – you need to tailor the content you share on each platform to match the target audience you set for that platform.
While there may be some overlap, in general, you need to adjust your content to fit each platform’s unique audience. Tailor what you post to match the expectations and preferences of the specific audience you're targeting on each platform.
With that in mind, you should definitely be conducting an audience audit as part of your social media audit. That means tapping into demographics data, social listening insights and finding out more about your audience’s preferences. Native analytics can give you a snapshot of audience age, gender, location and device preferences (mobile vs desktop), but social listening goes a step further.
By doing sentiment analysis, for instance, you can truly understand how your audience feels about your content, helping you create more tailored posts that resonate with your followers across various platforms.
Based on these audience insights, you can start to define or refine your social media personas. Quick reminder: a social media persona is the detailed profile of a brand’s ideal customer on social media, based on demographics, behavior, and interests.
Remember, it's the audience that fuels and sustains your brand's journey. Looking at your audience is one of the key social media best practices to prioritize as you're building your social media audit report.
So, if your brand values resonate with your audience, it's a clear indicator that your content is aligning with the interests of those who matter.
#6. Perform a competitive analysis
No audit is truly complete with a thorough social media analysis of your competitors. This allows you to understand your own brand’s performance in a larger context.
Dissecting your own brand’s performance can only get you so far. By gathering competitive intelligence data, you can effectively identify gaps in your social media marketing strategy, spot trends as they emerge and discover new opportunities for improvement.
It’s true, what’s working for others might not always work for you. However, you can leverage the competitive insights you find during this analysis to help you refine your strategy, explore new content pillars for social media and maybe switch up your approach to community management.
So, should you go about a competitor's analysis? Well, the wisest, most convenient option for any social media strategist is to use an advanced tool for social media analysis and competitive benchmarking like Socialinsider.
Through Socialinsider’s benchmarking feature, a social media auditor can compare any number of social media profiles (owned and competitor) and get cross-channel or brand-level insights, as well as comparative data on each individual platform as part of a social audit.
Let’s take a practical example.
Say you’re Puma, the famous sportswear brand, and you are currently auditing your social media activity to check if your current strategy is working or it needs some adjustments. As part of your audit, you take a look at your closest competitors, the likes of Nike, Adidas, Underarmour.
Your goals are to:
- See and analyze your competitors’ top performing content to understand what type of content their audience most engages with
- Identify their most active social media channels (with the highest posting frequency)
- Track their posting schedule and see which posting times work best for them in terms of audience engagement
Additionally, you might want to look into:
- Recent social media campaigns your competitors ran and how well they performed
- Top performing content formats (videos, images, Reels etc)
- Major changes in follower count
You can start with a comparative brand performance overview.
Pro tip: to be able to visualize brand-level social media data, you first need to group together all the social media profiles for each brand.
During a brands benchmark, you can track multiple metrics (engagement, impressions, viewers, posting frequency and more, depending on what you choose). You can set your own brand as a “focus brand” to have an easier time finding it in the list.
For channel-specific insights, you can select any of the platforms shown on the left-side menu. As you scroll down, you'll also find comparative data charts that show the evolution of key metrics like engagement and follower growth.
#7. Compare your brand’s KPIs with industry benchmarks
What is a social audit without some good ol’ industry benchmarks?
Your engagement may be much higher compared to the last channel audit, but how does it stack against the industry average? How about your impressions, views or even follower growth rate?
Keeping an eye on your competitors is only one way to check if your brand is on the right track. Another is to compare your KPIs to industry benchmarks.
For instance, if during one of your monthly audits, you realize that your TikTok engagement rate sits at a mere 1.5%, but according to the latest social media benchmarks, the average is 2.75%, that's a sign you should be refining your strategy.
Either through benchmarking tools or industry reports, you should be able to find industry benchmarks for any KPI that matters to your brand. But finding accurate, up-to-date, reliable data to compare your brand against is often a big challenge.
For that reason, you should only base your social media reports on trusted sources. Here’s how to verify the validity and relevance of the data is to:
- Check the time range – the timeframe during which the data was collected should be as close to the present as possible, in order to be relevant. In other words, there's no point in using 2021 industry benchmarks data for your 2024 Q3 social media audit.
- Trace the info back to the source – if the industry reports you find cite various sources for their data, trace those links back to the source of the information.
- Do a quick “background check” – have a look at previous reports published by the same source. Do they seem just as reliable? Do any of their reports contradict one another?
As a social auditor, you should always be very curious and cautious about the sources that you use for your reports.
#8. Create actionable insights and optimize your strategy based on data
The first step in any social audit is to do reconnaissance and gather data. The last step is to create an action plan based on your findings.
Whatever data on your brand’s social media performance you collect loses its meaning if it’s not turned into actionable insights. It’s only half the story. The real purpose of any social media audit is to gather valuable data that you can use to refine your strategy and reach your goals.
If you’re gone through all these steps listed above, you should now have everything you need to put together an action plan.
Centralizing all your data and insights will help you build a comprehensive social media audit presentation which you can send or show to upper management or your clients. This presentation should include a clear strategy, describing what you plan to improve or consolidate moving forward.
For your own convenience, you can save this as a social media audit template pdf and use it for all future brand audits.
Social media audit checklist
If you happen to google “does a social media audit include?” you will most likely find several types of guides outlining the key aspects of conducting a social media audit. As you’ve seen so far in this particular article, this is important for understanding the why and how behind every step of the auditing process.
However, one essential tool you should always have on hand is an audit checklist. This is a brief, easy-to-follow list of items you should check during an audit.
Here’s everything you should include in your social media audit (for every single active chanel):
Profile information
- Links to every brand channel
- Bios/ profile descriptions
- Profile/cover pictures
- Branded and/or frequently used hashtags
- Date of your last published post
Performance information
- Number of posts
- Number of followers
- Posting frequency
- Engagement rate
- Reach and impressions
- Video views
- Traffic sources
- Sentiment stats
- Best performing content formats
- Top 5 posts
Audience information
- Demographics data
- Buyer personas
- Followers growth
Competitors information
- Links to top 5 or top 10 competitors
- All relevant metrics for comparison
Ad performance (optional)
- Relevant KPIs (such as reach, clicks, conversions) for any paid social media campaigns
Goals
- Performance gaps and areas of improvement
- Objectives to meet by the next social audit
When creating a strategic plan for a brand on social, I follow a simple process that begins with discovery. This involves collaborating with various teams beyond just social e.g. analytics, CRM, search, creative, and influencer marketing, to gather as much existing data as possible.
I also identify and consult key stakeholders to understand brand performance across all digital channels. Next, I conduct a thorough audit of the brand, its audience, the market, and the cultural landscape relevant to the client's industry. Only after this in-depth research and analysis do I develop a strategic plan. – Kineta Kensall
Social media audit template
We've developed this comprehensive social media audit template, which is free to access, no email required, and is available for all busy marketers.
In this spreadsheet, you can see exactly what KPIs you need to keep an eye on and how to analyze your performance, along with tips, YoY, SWOT, and competitor analysis.
And if you follow the above steps on how to perform a social media audit, and add the right tools in the mix, you are good to go!
Social media audit report example
Learning how to create a social media audit can be quite daunting, but don’t let the influx of new information intimidate you or hold you back. Social auditing is a pretty simple process once you get the hang of it (and gather all the right social media audit tools to make your life easier).
So far in this guide we’ve covered all the key steps involved in a social media audit, highlighted the main benefits of auditing your content and summarized it all in a handy checklist you can follow any time you perform a social audit.
The only thing left to do is to actually show you how it’s done.
So, if you’re still wondering how to do a social media audit for a client, here’s a sneak peak into the social auditing process using Socialinsider.
Brand: Mountain Dew
Timeframe: last 3 months (June - September 2024)
Profiles: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter
Accounts check
- All 4 accounts have similar bios
- All 4 accounts use the same profile picture (the iconic brand logo)
- All 4 accounts bios include the company's branded hashtag (#DoTheDew)
Performance check
From this brand performance overview, we can see that:
- Instagram is Mountain Dew’s top-performing platform in terms of engagement, and Facebook in terms of the number of followers.
- Mountain Dew posts most frequently on Twitter and Instagram
- Mountain Dew’s total engagement from the last 3 months is due mostly to its Instagram account.
- Engagement has decreased across all platforms (compared to previous period). Twitter has suffered the biggest drop in engagement.
Individual channel audit (picking Instagram for this example)
In the last 3 months, Moutain Dew has reached a total of 724K followers, sharing a total of 54 posts since June.
- In terms of content formats, for Moutain Dew, the most engaging content type is carousel, contrary to the general trends of Reels' engagement supremacy.
- When it comes to brand awareness, efforts were a bit slower, with the brand scoring a 20% decrease in the average reach and impressions generated.
In the last 3 months, Dove’s community on Instagram has grown by 0.60%, albeit at a slower pace compared to the previous period.
Their most engaging Instagram post from the past 3 months is a product-themed carousel published in July, with an average engagement rate of 5.17% and an estimated reach of almost 317K people.
Here are the complete guides on how to do a social media audit for each major social media platform:
Conclusion
Doing a brand social media audit is not as complicated as it sounds. The benefits of doing it are certainly worth the hassle.
With the social audit template I shared in this article, all the insights on how and what to include in a social media audit, the free tools, and your knowledge at your disposal, you'll be well-equipped to streamline the process and uncover valuable insights.
So, the next time you are preparing for a social media audit presentation, trust the data and lean on your marketing instincts to ace it!
FAQs on social media audit
1. What should be included in a media audit?
A comprehensive social media audit should include key performance indicators (KPIs) including engagement rates, follower growth, reach, impressions, and conversion metrics.
It should evaluate the success of your content strategy as well as the demographics and behavioral patterns of your audience, an analysis of your competitors, the performance of your platform, and any new trends or opportunities in your niche.
2. How often should you conduct a social media audit?
The frequency of conducting a social media audit can vary depending on factors such as the size of your audience, the pace of change in your industry, and the resources available for analysis.
However, some businesses audit social media content once per month, but no less than once a quarter, to stay on top of performance trends, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that your strategies remain aligned with your business objectives.
Analyze your social media performance and benchmark competitors!
