How To Do A Social Media Audit That Increases Performance (Step-By-Step)

Want to learn how to do a social media audit the right way? I’ve got you covered.

Social media isn’t just about posting content and hoping for the best—you need to continuously analyze, optimize, and improve your strategy to set yourself up for long-term success.

That’s where a social media audit comes in. 

It gives you a clear picture of your whole social media presence so you can identify what’s working and what isn’t, and come away with actionable insights to improve going forward.

In this post, I’ll show you the right way to conduct a social media audit. We’ll walk through the whole process, step-by-step. But first, let’s start with the basics…

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit is a comprehensive review of your brand’s entire presence on social media.

The idea is to assess your performance, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and uncover insights and opportunities for improvement.

There’s no exact blueprint for a social media audit. They can vary wildly in scope, and some are much more comprehensive than others.

However, they typically involve analyzing your accounts, goals, content, engagement, audience, competitors, and overall strategy.

What you’ll need

Before we begin, you’ll need the right tools.

A successful social media audit requires you to dig deep into the data. You’ll need to track concrete metrics to analyze your performance and discover areas where you can improve.

Most social media platforms offer native analytics features that allow you to check your performance on them individually.

However, they only cover the most basic metrics, and jumping between each individual platform is a huge time-sink, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Instead, I’d recommend using a dedicated social media analytics tool that offers deeper insights and cross-channel reporting so you can see everything in one place. 

Which one? That will depend on the scope of your audit. 

SocialBee offers the best social media page & post analytics, so it’s ideal for auditing your social media content, audience, and posting schedule. I’ll be using it for most of the audit steps in this post.

If you want to go further than that and also audit your competitors, influencer partnerships, and social media ads, you’ll need something more comprehensive. Social Status is a good option in that case as it covers pretty much everything, including both organic and paid insights.

Other tools that might come in useful are Brand24 (for analyzing brand mentions and sentiment) and Google Analytics (for analyzing social media traffic and conversions). But again, these might not be necessary depending on the scope of your audit.

How to do a social media audit: Step-by-step

In this step-by-step guide, I’m going to walk you through all the steps required for a fully comprehensive social media audit, which means I’ll be covering everything.

But that doesn’t mean you need to follow this guide to the letter. You might skip certain steps if you don’t think they’re relevant in your case. Likewise, there might be extra steps you want to do that I haven’t covered here. The scope is up to you.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s jump into it.

Step 1: List your profiles

Start by making a list of all your brand’s social media accounts. 

Take stock of which profiles/pages you’re active on, and which ones you’re inactive on. If you’re not posting content at least once a week, I’d class that as inactive.

Are there any social networks you don’t have an account on at all? If so, now’s the time to claim an account on them under your company name. 

Even if you don’t plan on posting to that social media platform at all, it’s still worth claiming your company accounts on them to prevent imposters from impersonating your brand. Plus, you never know if you’ll pivot to them in the future.

Remember also that new social networks are popping up all the time. Last year brought us Bluesky & Threads, for example. Consider this and make sure you’ve secured branded accounts on any new networks that have appeared since your last audit.

Step 2: Audit your profiles

Now you have a list of all your social media accounts, it’s time to audit them. 

This step is to make sure your branding is consistent across every page/profile and that they’re all well-optimized for discovery and conversions. Here’s what to do.

• Check your usernames. Make sure your username/handle is consistent across social media platforms. Ideally, it should be your brand name in every case. On some platforms, your brand name may be taken. In these cases, you should be using a similar alternative.
• Check your visual branding. Your profile picture, cover image, and other visual elements should be consistent across platforms. You should be using the same logos and brand colors and all visuals should be high-quality.
• Check your bios. Look over your social media bios on each account. They should be optimized for discovery, including relevant keywords your target audience might search for. They should also be written in your brand’s chosen tone of voice. If promoting links in your bio, make sure all links are up-to-date and relevant to your current campaign goals.
• Check for verified badges. Many social networks offer ‘verified’ badges to qualifying accounts. This usually includes established brands/companies. Make sure you’re verified and have the appropriate badge wherever available.

Step 3: Cast an eye over your social media goals

One of the aims of a social media audit is to ensure your social efforts are well-aligned with your wider business objectives.

With that in mind, the next step is to consider your social media goals. 

Establishing up-to-date goals will help to guide the rest of the audit, as knowing what you’re aiming for now will allow you to assess which social media activities are effectively contributing to your objectives later.

Here are some tips for this step:

• Make sure your goals are SMART. Make sure all your social media goals follow the SMART framework. That means they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Make sure you’ve set individual goals for each platform. Goals shouldn’t be overly broad, e.g. ‘Grow my social media following’. They should be specific for each social network, e.g. ‘Get 10,000 more Facebook page followers’ or ‘Reach 5,000 subscribers on YouTube’.
• Make sure your goals are up-to-date. You may have already set social media goals in the past. If so, cast your eye over them now to make sure they’re still relevant to your wider business objectives this year.

On that last point: Let’s imagine that last year your business’ primary goal was to increase sales. As a result, your main goal for social media was to drive traffic to your website/product pages in line with that business objective.

This year, your business’s primary goal has shifted to cutting costs and reducing expenses. So, your social media goals will have to shift too. Instead of driving traffic, your primary aim might now be to improve efficiency or return on ad spend (ROAS). See what I mean?

Step 4: Analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs)

Now we’re going to dive into the data. 

It’s time to open up your preferred analytics tool and look at your performance metrics (e.g. impressions, reach, engagements, follow growth, etc.) for each channel. 

On SocialBee, you can view these through the Analytics dashboard. Just select the profile you want to analyze from the drop-down menu at the top. 

The questions you’re looking to answer here are:

• Are you hitting your targets? Compare your performance in your KPIs to your social media goals. Are you growing as fast as you hoped to? Is your engagement rate where it needs to be?
• How has your performance evolved over time? What’s the year-over-year change in your reach/impressions/engagement/followers? Is everything trending in the right direction or the wrong one? Have there been any spikes or dips in performance? And if so, what might have caused them?
• What are your top-performing channels? Which social media platforms are you performing better and worse on? Do you need to pivot based on this? For example, if you were aiming to drive traffic mostly through YouTube but you’re getting more views on TikTok, you might want to prioritize TikTok going forward.

Bonus tip: If metrics like mention volume, brand sentiment, and social share of voice are important to you (this might be the case if your goals on social media are to boost brand awareness or manage your reputation), you’ll need a social listening tool to analyze them. I’d recommend Brand24 for this.

Step 5: Identify your top-performing content

Next, we’re going to dig deeper into the data and look at individual post performance to gather insights to inform our organic social media content strategy.

The goal of this step is to figure out which post formats (e.g. videos, carousels, text posts, etc.) and post types (e.g. funny memes, expert tips, promotional posts, etc.) are having the biggest impact and which are having the least impact.

We can then feed those insights back into our social media strategy going forward, prioritizing post types that have proven to perform well in our content mix and dropping those that tend to flop.

SocialBee is ideal for this. Under Post History, you can sort all your previous posts by various metrics, including most/least engagement and most/least impressions, to quickly see what your bottom and top-performing pieces of content are.

Under Insights, you can do the same for your top post types and content categories—these are buckets of posts organized around a shared theme (e.g. quotes, questions, blog posts, etc.)

What’s really cool about SocialBee is it also offers category-based post scheduling. So, if you notice a particular content category is performing especially well, you can schedule posts from that category to get posted more often to each of your connected social media accounts.

Speaking of scheduling posts…

Step 6: Audit your posting schedule

A social media audit isn’t just about examining what you post, it’s also about looking at when you post it.

With that in mind, the next step is to audit your posting schedule.

Start by figuring out what your best time to post is. SocialBee can automatically calculate this for you based on your historical performance. But if you want to work it out manually, you can do that too.

Just go to Insights. From there, you can view a bubble or heat map that shows you the distribution of metrics like engagements, likes, comments, impressions, etc. throughout the day.

This can help you pinpoint your optimal posting times for each metric and feed that back into your posting schedule. 

For instance, if you notice your posts tend to get the most impressions at 2 PM, and your main goal is to get more eyes on your content, then you can start posting more content around this time.

Another thing to consider here is your posting frequency. Look at your analytics to find out how often you post to each platform, and ask yourself if that needs to change. 

You might think you’re posting too much or too little. Again, make notes on this and feed any areas for improvement back into your strategy.

Step 7: Analyze your social media audience

It’s worth looking at your audience demographic data as part of your social media audit. 

You can view this on SocialBee under Analytics > Page Analytics > Demography. Just select the profile you want to analyze in the top corner first.

This data will contextualize your results and help you figure out whether or not you’re reaching the people you want to reach. 

For example, let’s imagine you’re an ecommerce platform that sells products to customers in the United States.

Your KPIs might look good on paper, but when you dig a little deeper, you might realize the bulk of your impressions are coming from users in India, so you’re hardly reaching US buyers at all. That’s a sign something needs to change.

Likewise, if you’re targeting Gen Z but your audience is mostly Gen X, it might signal that you need to change your messaging and share more content that appeals to younger demographics.

Looking at your demographics can also tell you which social media platforms are best for your goals. 

Certain networks tend to resonate more with specific demographics than others, and your audience demographics can confirm this, so you can prioritize those that give you the best chance to reach the people you’re trying to reach.

Step 8: Examine your social media traffic

As part of your audit, you might want to look at the impact your social media efforts are having outside of the social media platform—how they’re impacting things like website traffic, leads, and conversions.

For this, you’ll need to look beyond the data you get in your social media analytics tool. You’ll need to merge it with data from Google Analytics to analyze how the traffic you drive through your social media marketing efforts behaves once it’s on your site. 

There are lots of social media analytics tools that can integrate with Google Analytics to do this. Unfortunately, SocialBee isn’t one of them, but there are other options, including Sprout Social.

Step 9: Audit your competitors

Your social media audit is a good opportunity to benchmark your performance against your competitors.

Social Status is great for this. It offers detailed competitive reporting capabilities and can tell you everything you need to know about your social media rivals, including their KPIs, best-performing posts, etc.

You can even compare your performance with theirs side by side to figure out whether you’re performing above average or if there’s room for improvement.

As always, make notes on any strengths or weaknesses you identify when auditing your competitors. This will come in useful later when revisiting your social media strategy.

Step 10: Examine your partnerships

If you partner with influencers, creators, or other brands as part of your social media marketing strategy, then you might also want to audit your partners.

Some social media analytics tools, including Social Status, offer detailed influencer analytics that can help you audit any public social media profile.

You might also want to track and analyze the results of any influencer marketing campaigns you’ve run in the past to measure their impact. 

Did you achieve your goals? How many clicks/engagements/impressions did they generate? Which partners have driven the best/worst results?

These are all important questions to ask that can provide useful insights to inform your future influencer marketing efforts.

Step 11: Audit your social media ad campaigns

So far, we’ve looked mainly at how to audit your organic social media efforts. But if you run social media ads, you’ll also want to analyze your paid performance.

Again, Social Status offers a dedicated ads analytics feature that can help with this. It can track the results of all your social media ad campaigns and show you the KPIs you need to assess performance, like cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and so on.

Dig through the data to extract any insights you can apply going forward. For example, do ads on a particular social network perform better than others? What targeting options work best? Which ad creatives perform best? What about ad copy? You get the idea.

Step 12: Examine your social media workflows

Another reason to do a social media audit is to make sure you’re making the most of your time and budget.

With that in mind, one last step is to examine your workflows. 

That means looking at the ways you create, schedule, and publish posts; reply to comments and messages, and do all the other day-to-day tasks involved in managing your social media presence—and seeing if you can find any ways to optimize them and improve your efficiency.

For instance, if you currently manually publish posts to all your accounts individually, you can save time by using a social media scheduling tool that allows you to schedule posts across networks in one sitting (months in advance).

And if you currently manually reply to each comment and message from your followers individually, you can probably save time by using a unified social inbox. 

These tools pull all your engagements into one place and offer features like saved replies to help you reply to them more efficiently.

Step 13: Compile everything into a report

Once you’ve completed your social media audit, compile all the relevant data into a report. 

Your report should showcase all the metrics that you think are relevant and highlight key takeaways such as strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.

You can then share this report with your clients or stakeholders to get buy-in. Plus, if you work with a team, you can share it with them to keep everyone on the same page.

It’s up to you exactly what data you include in your report. Social Status has an excellent reporting tool that lets you choose exactly what you want to show.

Step 14: Come up with an action plan for the future

The whole point of your social media audit was to show you where you’re at right now and how you can improve going forward.

So, take what you’ve learned and use it to come up with an action plan for the future.

This might mean tweaking your goals, prioritizing new social media channels, optimizing your posting schedule, or changing your content mix. 

Again, there’s no right or wrong way to go about this. You can go into as much or as little detail as you like—as long as you walk away with actionable next steps.

Final thoughts

That concludes our guide on how to do a social media audit that increases performance.

To recap, there’s no one-size-fits-all social media audit template that will work for everyone.

But the general idea is to use social media audit tools like SocialBee to analyze your profiles, goals, content, schedule, and competitors. 

Then, use that data to figure out what’s working and what needs to be changed, and feed those insights back into your strategy to improve your performance in the future.