How To Do a Social Media Audit [9 Easy Steps]

A social media audit doesn’t have to be a challenge. It’s necessary if you want your social media marketing to succeed. The audit will help you assess the results of your social media activities, discover your strengths and weaknesses, and implement necessary changes to your social media marketing strategy. 

How to conduct a social media audit on your own?

The process might sound complicated, but it’s easier than you think.

This step-by-step guide to a social media audit will help you structure the audit process making it a piece of cake.

Here’s what’s ahead of us today:

• What is a social media audit?
• How to conduct a social media audit in 9 steps:
  • 01 Create a spreadsheet
  • 02 Define goals of social media strategy
  • 03 Create a list of all your social media profiles
  • 04 Make sure your branding is consistent
  • 05 Identify the social media metrics that matter
  • 06 Identify content that matters
  • 07 Conduct sentiment analysis
  • 08 Determine your ROI
  • 09 Check your presence score
• The social media audit checklist
• The benefits of social media audit

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit is an in-depth review of all your social media accounts and activity. This includes everything from your posts and comments to your social media strategy and goals.

The purpose of a social media audit is to get a clear picture of your social media presence and performance, so you can identify areas for improvement.

A social media audit is an essential part of any social media marketing strategy. If you want to make sure your social media accounts are performing at their best, regular audits are a must.

Here’s everything you always wanted to know about social media audits.

How to do a social media audit in 9 steps

01 Create a spreadsheet

Writing down all the necessary data is essential.

Having one file with all your social media audit data will help you compare the results month to month, quarter to quarter or year to year, depending on your needs.

That’s why you need to create a spreadsheet.

To carry out a digital presence audit, you will need to gather data from all your social media channels.

This can be time-consuming, but it’s worth it to get a comprehensive overview of your social media activity.

Once you have all the data, you can start to analyze it and look for patterns and trends. This will help you to identify what’s working well and what needs to be improved.

Since all social media channels have slightly different metrics, you have to create a separate Google Docs spreadsheet for every platform.

02 Define goals of social media strategy

When it comes to social media, it’s important to have a clear strategy in place. That means defining specific goals for each social media network you’re active on.

What do you want to achieve with Facebook? How about Twitter? LinkedIn?

The key is to be specific and realistic with your goals. Once you understand what you want to achieve, you can start working on a plan to make it happen.

Here’s and examples of social media goals:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Discovering audience insights
• Generating sales
• Building engaged community
• Growing traffic to your site
• Gaining broad social media reach

You will need some social media audit tools to measure your goals:

• Google Analytics will help you measure traffic, sales and conversion goals.
• Analytics provided by social media apps will tell you many insights about your followers, such as localization and demographic information, posts reach and engagement, etc. 
• Social media listening tool to detect brand awareness, sentiment analysis, and mentions.

03 Create a list of all your social media profiles

Start with finding all the social profiles you ever set up. There’s a chance you log in to YouTube or Snapchat only once a few years back, but the profile is still there.

It’s ok not to be present everywhere but having social media profiles with no activity whatsoever could have adverse effects on your brand image and social presence.

A tool like Namechk will help you dust off old social media channels.

As I mentioned before, you don’t have to be present everywhere, but it’s a good idea to keep a finger on all the developments in social networks.

By being an early adopter, you might gain a competitive advantage and position your company as an industry leader.

If looking for new social media channels is just too much in your busy life, take a look at our Social Recap. It’s just a couple of minutes that will keep you up to date with recent developments in marketing.

04 Make sure your branding is consistent

Have you ever seen a business with a mismatched website, logo, and branding? It doesn’t look very professional, does it?

That’s because branding is important, and it needs to be consistent across all social media platforms.

Your branding is what sets you apart from your competitors and tells your customers who you are.

Make sure that your audience knows immediately that they are looking at the profile of your company.

Consistency is key.

• Start with checking your profile and cover photos. Check whether images match your current branding and fit the social platform’s image size requirements.

• Make sure you’re using the same username on all social media profiles.
• Check the URL you provide with your bio information. It’s easy to forget that you change the link once for a specific campaign that’s no longer running.
• Wite bio text that describes your brand and products in a user-friendly way.
• You can verify your profile on some of social media platforms. A verification will give you an additional boost to the awareness of your brand as your audience will immediately know that they are in the right place.

05 Identify the social media metrics that matter

There are plenty of key social media metrics to follow, and it might be hard to distinguish the important ones from vanity metrics. I recommend taking a closer look at the numbers for:

• Engagement
• Shares
• Number of mentions
• Impressions
• Referral traffic
• Clicks on links
• Social media reach

I deliberately omitted the followers’ count. This number says absolutely nothing about the health of your social media profile.

You can have a lot of followers, but it’s the number of interactions (engagement, shares or impressions) that counts.

After all, it’s better to have 1 000 followers who are interested in your message than 1 000 000 followers who couldn’t care less about your offer.

06 Identify content that matters

The whole point of social media audits is to identify content that resonates well with your audience and emulate these posts.

It might be hard to compare posts from different channels as everyone uses slightly different metrics.

That’s where you can use a social media monitoring tool, for example, Brand24.

You’ll find the most important information in the Analysis tab. Brand24 will analyze the mentions and give you information about:

• The most popular authors
• The most popular mentions
• Estimated social media reach
• Social media interaction
• Social media likes
• Social media comments

And many more! You’ll find the filters in the right upper corner, and you’ll be able to split the results according to the social platform you want to audit.

What’s also super important while conducting a successful social media audit is taking a deeper look at your referral networks. That can be easily done with Google Analytics under Acquisition.

For example, in the last 30 days, the Nike brand has the wides reach on TikTok:

07 Conduct sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether social media posts are written in a positive, negative, or neutral way.

Conducting sentiment analysis of social media posts can give you valuable insights into how people feel about your brand.

It can help you to understand what people like and don’t like about your product, and it can also help you to identify any negative sentiment that might be brewing.

And finally, social media sentiment analysis can also help you to detect early signs of potential problems, such as a decline in customer satisfaction.

Conducting sentiment analysis on a regular basis can therefore be a valuable tool for businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve.

Furthermore, it’s worth tracking the Reputation Score of your brand:

08 Determine your ROI

I know how hard it is to measure the ROI from your social media activities.

You can, of course, count the number of conversions from social media channels, but how to do it when conversions are not your main objective?

What if you want to focus on brand awareness? Or sales that are inspired by social media but do not come directly from social?

An ROI is, however, an essential part of your social media audit. It will prevent you from spending resources on activities that will never deliver any value to your company.

You can track the number of downloads of an ebook or any other dedicated content.

Google Analytics will help you measure the number of organic traffic or sessions on your website.

A great social media metric will be tracking hashtag performance.

Here’s how the Brand24 tool can help you do that. Actually, the tool will calculate all the metrics for you.

In the Summary tab, you’ll find the most important information, e.g.:

• The total number of results
• Social media reach
• Social media interactions
• Count of positive mentions
• Count of negative mentions

The best part is that you will immediately see a difference within the time range you’ve chosen.

Brand24 will analyse two periods and show you the difference in metrics. It’s basically a social media audit handed on a silver platter.

You can divide the fruit of your social media audit into three categories.

09 Check your presence score

The last step of your social media audit should be checking the online presence score of your brand. Presence Score is a great way to check whether your social media strategy is on a good track.

The metric measure the popularity of the brand at the given time. Also, it helps to measure and benchmark brand awareness.

How to measure it? One of the most effective ways is to use a social media monitoring tool that will do the job for you. 

The social media audit checklist

No matter the industry or company size, a successful audit will include some universal points.

These are common elements of social media audit:

• Audience data – depending on the audience demographic data, your message and its delivery will vary. Check which social media channels your target audience is using and target your message according to the rules of the social media platform.
• Profile information – make sure all your bio information and links you posted on your social accounts are up-to-date.
• Engagement rate – take a look at the rates of engagement. Is your audience responding well to your messaging? What are the best-performing posts on your Instagram account? How fast are your followers’ counts rising? How does your content spread across social media?
• Publishing schedule – monitor how often you publish on specific social media channels.
• Referral traffic – which social media channels are driving the most traffic to your website? 

The benefits of social media audits

Let’s start with short-term goals. A social media audit will help you determine where you currently are with your social strategy.

It will identify top-performing posts, key insights the best performing social channels and help you create new objectives, like working on your engagement metrics, growing your follower count or reaching a brand new audience, or other social metrics.

According to the Harvard Business Review, consumers now generate over 25% of content that appears in web searches for specific brand names.

They also tend to trust the user-generated content much more than traditional forms of advertising.

A social media audit will help you influence the most important discussions around your brand conducted on the Internet – the ones that centre around your brand or product on social platforms.

A social media audit will also deliver clear standards that you can incorporate across many channels.

Any time there’s a new platform, you will have guidelines in place that will assure your overall social media presence is consistent, and your brand is easily recognizable.

To sum up, thanks to a comprehensive social media audit you will:

• Collect data to perform a SWOT analysis and identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• Make sure your brand is represented consistently and appropriately across different social media channels
• Grab all the opportunities that arise for your brand – a social media world offers plenty of events to build your brand awareness – it’s your job to spot them
• Measure how your brand performs across various social media channels, including some key metrics of reach, sentiment, volume, engagement, and more.

Are you ready to perform your first social media audit? Try the social listening tool that will help you do it!

FAQ

What is an example of a social audit?

Social media auditing is a thorough examination of a brand’s social media presence and strategy. It includes analyzing various aspects of social media analytics, such as audience demographics, engagement rates, audience growth rate, content performance, and more across different social networks.

For instance, a social audit may involve analyzing your Facebook page to identify the demographics of your followers, the types of posts that generate the most engagement, and how quickly your audience is growing over time. This information can then be used to optimize your social media strategy for improved engagement and growth.

Is it necessary to conduct a social media audit?

Yes, conducting a social media audit is necessary for any business that wants to make the most out of its social media efforts. Audits help you understand how well your social media strategy is working, offering insights into community engagement, audience growth, and other important metrics. By analyzing the collected data, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, allowing you to refine your strategy and increase your social media effectiveness.

What are the risks of a social media audit?

The risks of an online presence audit often involve the potential for overlooking some of your platforms, especially new social media platforms where your brand may have a growing presence. In conducting an audit, it’s crucial to ensure that it covers all your platforms, leaving no stone unturned. Another risk is the misinterpretation of data, leading to inaccurate conclusions about your brand’s performance or reach on these platforms.