Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to drive brand awareness, engagement, and sales. You can use every trick in the book with a well-thought-out strategy and reap the benefits, but sometimes, no matter what you do, things don’t seem to be working out.
If you’re here, the piece of the puzzle you’re likely missing is a comprehensive social media audit. Without it, all your effort is simply a shot in the dark. Let’s learn how to evaluate your social media presence with the help of our experts and how to implement those much-needed insights.
Table of Contents
What Is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit involves thorough examinations of your social media presence and performance. This is done by analyzing various metrics across all your social media accounts to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies.
By conducting a social media audit, you can gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your social media marketing strategy. It allows you to identify your audience's preferences and the types of content that perform best, all with the goal of improving engagement and boosting return on investment (ROI).
37% of social browsers visited a company’s social media page before purchasing a product or service, so it’s vital to ensure your prospective customers’ belief in your brand is reinforced after seeing your online presence.
How To Do a Social Media Audit
Conducting a social media audit may sound daunting as audit is a term mostly used by accountants (and we know how scary and complicated that sounds), but breaking it down into manageable steps can make the process straightforward and even enjoyable.
Step 1: List All Your Social Media Accounts
This may sound a little unnecessary since you surely have all your accounts already on your mind even while reading this, but everyone can forget one or two unused or even new ones (remember Threads?).
List all the accounts where your brand has presence, including both active and inactive accounts. This will give you a complete picture of your social media footprint.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Profiles
Check each profile for completeness and consistency. Ensure that your branding (logo, cover photo, bio, etc.) is uniform across all platforms. This is very important as an inconsistent profile may confuse your followers and weaken your brand identity.
Studies have found that inconsistent expressions on social media can negatively affect a person’s or a brand’s trustworthiness, attractiveness, or authenticity.
Step 3: Analyze Your Audience
Look at your follower demographics on each platform. Are you reaching your target audience? Tools that can help you here by providing valuable demographic data are Facebook Insights, X Analytics, and Instagram Insights.
This can also affect your social media advertising costs as you will need to have a well-rounded insight into the specific demographics of your audience, as you would not want to lose money and target an audience that is not interested in your brand.
Step 4: Assess Engagement Metrics
Review the engagement metrics for your posts, such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, pins, and every other action that brings value to engagement. This can help you identify which types of content generate the most interaction and can guide your future content strategy.
Step 5: Measure Performance Against Goals
Get ahold of your business goals and the things you want to achieve and compare them with your social media performance. Are you meeting your objectives for brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, and sales? You can use Google Analytics or any other platform specific insights tool to track performance and pin down where you can improve.
Step 6: Conduct a Competitor Analysis
Your competitors are your best role models when you are running a social media audit. Analyze their social media strategy. What are they 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.
Step 7: Summarize Findings
Once you have everything on paper, compile your findings into a comprehensive report. Highlight key insights, strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This will be a roadmap for your social media strategy and plan moving forward.
Step 8: Conduct a Plan
After summarizing your findings, the next step is to create a detailed social media marketing plan. It should outline your goals, target audience, content strategy, posting schedule, and metrics for success. By having a clear plan in place, you can ensure that your social media efforts are not in vain and are aligned with your business objectives.
And if you’re looking to take your social media strategy to the next level, partnering with a social media marketing agency can be highly beneficial. These agencies offer expert services, helping you achieve better results with less effort. You can even skip the audit and let an agency handle it, as it is part of the services they offer.
How To Turn Social Media Audit Findings Into Insights
Analyzing data is just the beginning of a social media audit. The real value comes from turning those findings into actionable insights.
We reached out to our Agency Directory industry experts for their tips on successfully achieving this, and here is what they shared:
Prioritize Issues
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,” he continues.
For example, if you discover that a particular type of post consistently outperforms, it is crucial to address this immediately to avoid wasting resources on something that does not click with the audience.
Prioritizing will help you focus your efforts on areas that will have the greatest effect on your social media performance, making sure that you tackle the most critical issues first and improve your overall strategy more effectively.
Develop SMART Recommendations
Another insight by Rusmanica is that once you’ve prioritized your issues, it’s time to create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) recommendations. 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.
Know What Тo Post
We reached out to Aditya Roy, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at XAXs Corps, for advice on how to turn social media audit findings into insights, and he stated that: “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.
It’s advisable to highlight content types that generate high engagement and then plan to create more of these. Increasing the frequency of high-performing posts can help boost engagement and reach.
Experiment with new content ideas that align with your audience’s interest and even industry trends. Testing new content can help you discover new ways to engage your audience.
Misconceptions About Social Media Audits
We mentioned above that social media audits can sound a little scary and complicated, but that turned out to be one misconception many businesses believe in. Despite all its benefits, social media audits can often be misunderstood in a few different ways:
It Is Just Marketing “Fluff”
Some businesses believe that social media audits are just marketing “fluff.” However, they provide valuable insights that can drive growth and engagement and significantly improve your metrics and ROI.
Rusmanica’s point of view on this misconception matter is that: “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.
Tracking Is a Piece of Cake
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.”
It Is Just Numbers
Some businesses think that social media audits merely look at platform insights. While analytics are part of it, there are paths to figure out how to crack the code to your audience and improve your content and overall social media marketing strategy.
Aditya Roy concludes that: “A social media audit is digging deeper and finding the underlying issues and patterns that can be acted on.”
Wrapping Up on Social Media Audits
Now there you have it. Conducting a social media audit is an important practice for any business looking to maximize its social media potential and the effort put into it pays off. By understanding what works and what doesn’t, you can refine your strategy, engage your audience more effectively, and achieve your carefully crafted business goals.
Remember, the key is not just to gather data but to turn it into insights and drive results.
Social Media Audit FAQs
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.
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 anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks.
