How to Run a Social Media Audit in Simple Steps

What is a social media audit?

Simply put, a social media audit is a step-by-step procedure for tracking, compiling, and evaluating the current status of all your social media accounts in one place.

If a tax audit is a scary analogy for you, understand it as a quarterly or annual health check.

The goal is to understand what worked and what didn’t using social media metrics and record it in one place so you can easily derive new strategies based on the data.

Why is it important to perform a social media audit?

If you still don’t want to spend time on a social media audit, let me explain why conducting a social audit is essential to improving your social presence.

Choose the right channel : Just as your brand is different from the person upstairs, so is your target audience and the social media channel they end up on. An audit sheds light on which social channels are right for you and which are not.

See the real growth : A year-over-year or QOQ breakdown of all the right metrics from all the social channels in front of you gives you the real picture of growth that you can’t otherwise see. With proper auditing, you can also determine the real drivers of growth.

Align with goals : The social media audit framework allows you to track and review KPIs that are directly aligned with your marketing goals.

Catch Imposters : Helps you find outdated or impostor accounts that are preventing people from accessing your active profiles.

How to run a social media audit?

It doesn’t matter what type of business you or your clients have; if they have a social media presence, the audit process below will work.

Most likely, you will follow the steps below when you sit down to perform your first audit. I recommend that you download our social media audit template and use it to record the information mentioned at each step.

Social Media Audit Template

Step 1: Gather all your social profiles

Start by rounding up all the social media profiles run on behalf of your/client and put them in the sheet.

This may seem like a trivial thing; of course, you all know your social media profiles. Yes, you do, but still do the exercise, so you don’t miss any inactive profiles you created long ago and forgot about.

Additionally, you might be shocked to find unofficial accounts of your brand created by affiliates or imposters. Find them and close them.

The goal is to have a unified list of all your social profiles in one place so you can oversee and explore new or missing opportunities across any channel.

So, stretch your fingers and start searching for your brand name on Google and all other social networks.

For later, when you discover all the social networks that have a decisive impact on the growth of your brand or your customers, use SocialPilot to connect them all in one place for effortless post planning.

Social Profiles

Step 2: Fix any branding inconsistencies

Now that you have the list of all your social media accounts, check if they are all consistent in branding.

Consistent branding plays a vital role in maintaining trust and credibility with your audience.

So make sure each social channel is up-to-date and familiar with the look and voice of creatives, promotions, and campaigns.

Look at the consistency of our social profiles across all platforms.

Brand inconsistencies

Here are some things you need to check on all social media:

Profile and cover image

Profile biography

Profile Description

Pinned posts

Landing URLs and Landing Pages

Brand and campaign hashtags

Verification

social networks

Step 3: Determine your social media goals

Without targets, your audit is as good as a car driving in the dark on a highway without lights.

If you are going to dive into the information of any social media channel right now, you will find that there is

several social measures.

So, do you assess each of them in your audit? Maybe or maybe not.

Here the need for social goals comes into play.

With the correct social media goals for each platform, it becomes easier to select solid KPIs that you will add and evaluate in your social media audit.

And don’t forget that you may have different goals for different social channels.

social media marketing goals

So, does it increase subscribers, get more conversions, or create a community?

Step 4: Define your KPIs

Once your objectives are defined, it becomes easier to select the right key indicators that you should keep in your social media audit.