Social Media Audit: What Is It & Why Do You Need One?

Social media is an integral part of most businesses’ marketing strategies these days. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more allow companies to engage with customers, build their brand, advertise products and services, and analyze metrics to determine what’s working.

However, many businesses set up social media accounts without a clear strategy and randomly post content without tracking growth or results over time. This unstructured approach misses key optimization opportunities. That’s where conducting a social media audit comes into play.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit is a thorough, in-depth analysis and evaluation of a company’s social media presence, strategies, and activities including a review of each social media handle. It involves collecting both quantitative and qualitative data from all social platforms to identify what’s going well and what needs improvement.

The goal is to understand the health and performance of all social accounts to maximize their effectiveness. Key elements the audit looks at include:

• Growth metrics: Follower counts, engagement rates, clicks, conversions, etc.
• Content analysis: Post frequency, type, topic, engagement, clicks, etc.
• Audience research: Demographics, preferences, peak times, etc.
• Comparative analysis: Against competitors and industry benchmarks
• Brand monitoring: Mentions, sentiment, hashtags, etc.
• Ad performance: Reach, CTR, conversions, ROAS
• Workflow: Creation and approval processes

The audit provides comprehensive insights to diagnose problem areas and highlight optimization opportunities.

Why Do a Social Media Audit?

There are several key reasons companies should take time to audit their social media presence:

1. Identify Gaps in Performance

An audit reveals where your social media efforts are falling short. You may discover inconsistent brand messaging across networks, engagement rates poorer than competitors, or low quality content that needs improving. Identifying these gaps is the first step toward fixing them.

2. Set an Optimization Roadmap

The audit report provides a fact-based roadmap for optimizing social media moving forward. You’ll know which metrics and activities need the most attention to strengthen performance. Clear focus areas lead to an effective strategy.

3. Maximize ROI

Calculating social media return on investment (ROI) depends on monitoring key metrics over time. The audit gives you benchmarks to compare against in future analysis. Better data leads to stronger ROI. For example, you can understand the returns you can secure out of money you spend on graphic designing services.

4. Capitalize on Opportunities

A thorough content analysis will reveal social media opportunities you may be missing. For example, you will miss out how to use social media to benefit your SEO campaigns. The audit could uncover potential viral content formats, high-performing topics with customers, or conversations you should be part of. Capitalizing on these opportunities boosts engagement.

5. Align Efforts to Business Goals

Every social media activity should ultimately align with core business goals like revenue, customer acquisitions, brand awareness, etc. An audit identifies gaps between social media and business priorities so you can shift focus accordingly. You should do the audit whether you run an ecommerce website or any other type of a business website.

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit

While you can hire a social media agency to do an audit, it’s easy enough to DIY one. Follow this step-by-step guide:

•  Establish your goals, critical metrics and organize audit templates for data collection across each platform.
•  Collect quantitative analytics data. Pull platform insights to input hard metrics into your templates.
•  Gather qualitative, conversational data through hashtag searches, brand mentions monitoring, and audience research tools.
•  Analyze and compare findings, dig deeper into outliers, positives and negatives.
•  Identify optimization opportunities and prepare an audit results presentation.
•  Present audit findings and suggest next steps to stakeholders for buy-in.
•  Implement changes over the next quarter and track progress against benchmarks. Rinse and repeat with quarterly audits.

Final Words

Doing a regular social media audit is crucial for knowing what’s working well and what needs adjustment in your strategy. Take time to understand the health and effectiveness of your social presence in order to maximize its impact and align efforts to your business goals. A clear optimization roadmap will pay dividends.