Conducting A Social Media Audit (+ Free Template)

Conducting a social media audit is a key part of maintaining or updating your social media strategy. To make strategic decisions to grow and expand with social media, you need a document of your efforts to evaluate and analyze.

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Social media audits allow you to see what’s working and what’s not. You can also use them to identify new opportunities to expand your social engagement and optimize your business for online success.

If you’re looking to maximize your ROI, let’s go through the steps to equip you with the tools to make the most out of your social budget. Also, you can download our free template to help you track and organize your social media presence.

Table of Contents

• What Is A Social Media Audit?
  
• How To Conduct A Social Media Audit
  
• Free Social Media Audit Template

What is a Social Media Audit?

Definition: A social media audit is a series of steps that evaluate and optimize the social media strategies of a business. Performing a social media audit can help businesses (especially ecommerce businesses) find unique opportunities to drive more engagement and sales.

Why Conduct a Social Media Audit?

Social media is expanding rapidly with 3.02 billion people expected to be online and active by 2021.

From a business point of view, this offers incredible opportunities to reach online users and develop engaging relationships.

The sole purpose of conducting a social media audit is to:

• Identify your social media influence
  
• Analyze your social media presence
  
• Understand relationships between users and your business
  
• Discover opportunities to grow online
  
• Improve online strategies and tactics
  

Right now, your business is likely using one or more social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are five of the most popular platforms. However, you might also be using Snapchat, Pinterest, Periscope, Vimeo, and more.

Each platform has its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. And, not every platform may be beneficial to your business.

That’s why conducting a social media audit puts your social media efforts into perspective so you can determine where to invest your time, energy and money.

As you continue reading and learning about social media auditing, you may want to ask yourself (and find answers to) the following questions:

1. Does my presence on [NAME OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM] bring in new customers?
2. Which of my social media accounts have little to no impact on the growth and profitability of my business online?
3. Does [NAME OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM] help me retain customers?  
4. What strategies can I create and deploy to expand my social media reach, improve relationships with my audience, and convert more users into customers?
5. Are there areas of my social media presence that is not aligned with my core business values, long term goals, and online marketing strategy?

Next, let’s go through the steps for conducting a social media audit.

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit (in 45 Minutes or Less)

The word “auditing” can be an intimidating term.

For some businesses, the auditing process can take weeks to months to compile all data from each social media platform.

Let’s keep this simple and go through the entire process of conducting a social media audit in just 45 minutes or less. By the end, you should be able to effectively analyze your social media presence and identify which marketing techniques help you achieve your KPI benchmarks.  

Are you ready to get started?

(Pro Tip: Download the free social media audit template and go through the steps below to save time when you audit.)

1. Create Your Audit Document (or Download Our Template)

Think of auditing as detective work. You’re going to gather all the information on your social media channels and collect key details to analyze your performance on them.

The best way to organize this information is by creating a spreadsheet.

You can access our social media audit which you can access in Google Drive or use in a program like Excel. Feel free to use our template as a starting point for your own social media audit document.

In your social media audit spreadsheet, be sure to include the following:

1. Name of every social media account you use + handle (i.e. @VoyMediaAgency);
2. Link to each social media account (i.e. facebook.com/VoyMediaAgency/);
3. Name of team member or agency responsible for the management of each account;
4. Top 5 popular posts (in terms of social engagement);
5. All key metrics (i.e. number of followers, subscribers, etc.);
6. Additional notes (use this to track any relevant information about your accounts).

Once your document is ready, be sure to include additional tabs so you can update your spreadsheet on a quarterly basis and track your progress over time.

2. Record Social Media Data

With your social media audit document ready, it’s time to track down your data and fill out your chart.

Do a complete search online to identify every social media account with your business name on it. You may be surprised to find a few old accounts before your social media strategy was established.

This is also a good time to identify which social media platforms you are not using but could be beneficial in the future. Your social media audit should help you determine whether or not your social media strategy is actually bringing in business and identify new opportunities to grow more.

Tips

• Google Your Business Name. See what pops up. You may find abandoned channels or fake accounts pretending to be your business or representing you in the wrong way.
  
• Search on Social Media Platforms. Imposters and fakes can have a negative impact on your business and brand presence. Take a moment to search on every social media platform. In some cases, you may find that a social media handle (@YourBusinessName) is available. This would be a great time to add it to your business to preserve your online identity and reserve your handle for future use.
  

Record all relevant data in your spreadsheet. If there are accounts under your name that is unfamiliar or falsely representing your business, take note so that you can take action in the near future. You can reach out and contact the owner of these accounts and request that they shut them down. If you don’t get a reply or the response is unfavorable, you can always proceed to the next step my reporting the account and having the platform moderators intervene.

3. Ensure All Accounts Are “On Point”

As you’re going through each of your social media accounts, this is a good time to check a few small but important details.

Keep an eye out for the following:

• Account Branding. Do all your social media account follow the same branding style (i.e. logo in profile picture, same @handle, color style, etc.)?
  
• Bios. Are all your social account bios up-to-date? Do they share the same messaging? Is there any area you could improve upon? Do they adhere to your business values and brand messaging?
• Links. Are all the links to your website, store, and other social accounts working and up-to-date?
• Pinned Posts. Is it time to change the pinned post on Facebook? How can you optimize the content on your account to stay relevant and engaging?
  

4. Curate Your Top Posts

Go through each social account and find your top 3 to 5 posts. These will be posts that have the most engagement in terms of likes, shares, and comments.

As you curate the best of the best, keep an eye out for any trends.

• Do your image posts perform better than video posts?
• Are specific topics leading to higher engagement?
• Do people respond the same to your posts on Facebook as they do on Instagram?
  

If you spot any patterns or have a theory for what might be driving more engagement on your channel, add it to your notes. Later, you can use this to update your social media strategy to improve your performance over the next year.

5. Evaluate Your Social Performance

This step requires you to use the analytic tools provided by each social media platform. Here’s where you can find them for Facebook:

Go to Facebook Insights and select your page.

From your insights page, you can find information to add to your social media audit document. Use the side tabs to capture additional information, such as:

• Ads
• Followers
• Likes
• Reach
• Page Views
• Page Previews
• Posts
• Events
• Videos
• Stories
• People
• Messages
• Orders

It’s important to take note of the demographics to create the right marketing messages for each type. Add into your document the gender, age, and locations that make up the majority of your fans.

With Facebook, you don’t have to waste time browsing through all your posts to find your top 5. On the insights home page, scroll to the bottom to find your top posts curated and ready to analyze.

When you evaluate your social media channels, you’ll want to identify your KPI benchmarks for each account. You could be focused on increasing engagement, drive more traffic from social media to your website, or another metric you would define for your business.

As you evaluate your accounts, take note of which platforms that perform better than others. For example, if you’re sharing the same content on both Facebook and Instagram, yet Instagram is performing better than Facebook, you might want to reevaluate the content you post to your Facebook page. The point is, if you see a channel that’s underperforming, you should take time to determine whether its worthwhile to invest time and energy into it.

6. Update Account Security & Passwords

Your social accounts should be managed and operated by one owner. If you have different departments or teams of people, assign a single owner to each account.

That person should be in charge of keeping the account up-to-date, branded, and performing well. You can add additional responsibility, such as implementing your social media strategy and making decisions to hit KPI benchmarks.

To help keep your accounts secure, you should use a password protector like LastPass to centralize your passwords to a “vault” instead of people who may come and go from your business.

7. Perform Timely Audits

When you have completed your social media audit, it’s important to come back to the document you made to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

You’ll see in our template a section to perform a SWOT (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats) analysis. This is important to identify key areas of your social media strategy that needs to be improved or modified.

Try performing a quarterly (or yearly) social media audit. It’s best to keep your social media accounts working for your business to produce the best ROI. As you check in with your performance, you can compare the month-to-month work to see if they are actually taking you toward your goals or burning up your social budget.

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