Social Media AuditWhat is earning its keep?

Why audit at all#

Social presences accumulate. Accounts are opened for campaigns and forgotten, formats persist because they always have, reports track metrics nobody uses and the team's effort slowly drifts away from what the business needs. An audit is a deliberate pause to look at the whole thing with fresh eyes.

Audits are most useful at moments of change: a new strategy, a new team or agency, a rebrand, a drop in results, or simply once a year. They are least useful when they become a ritual that produces a long document and no decisions.

An audit that does not stop anything has not finished.

The audit process#

Stage 1: Set the frame#

Write down the business outcome social is meant to serve, the audience it should reach and the specific questions the audit must answer. "Why have enquiries from Instagram fallen?" or "Should we keep investing in our second YouTube channel?" are useful questions. "How are we doing on social?" is too vague to produce decisions. If you lack a clear outcome, start with social media strategy.

Stage 2: Inventory every account#

List every social account connected to the organisation, including old campaign accounts, regional pages, product accounts and anything an agency created. Many organisations discover accounts they forgot existed, sometimes with outdated information or no one able to log in.

Stage 3: Review every profile#

Look at each profile as a first-time visitor would. Is it immediately clear who you are, who you serve and what to do next? Are name, imagery and descriptions consistent with your brand guidelines? Are contact details, links, hours and locations correct? Does the most recent activity suggest a living organisation?

Stage 4: Content and performance#

Export at least six months of post data, ideally twelve, for each active account. Analyse it by format, series and pillar rather than by individual post, because single posts succeed or fail for reasons that are hard to repeat. Calculate rates against reach, as explained in social media KPIs, so that comparisons are fair.

• Which formats earn the most saves, shares and meaningful comments per reach?
• Which series consistently perform, and which consistently underperform?
• Which pillars attract the audience you want, judged by who engages?
• What share of content is promotional versus useful or entertaining?
• How quickly and how well do you respond to comments and messages?
• Which content drove clicks, enquiries or sales in your own analytics?

Look at competitors and peers too, but carefully. You are looking for gaps and patterns, not things to copy. What do they do that their audience clearly values? What are they ignoring? See competitive analysis.

Audience analysis#

Content performance tells you what worked; audience analysis tells you for whom. Use each platform's audience insights to check who actually follows and engages with your accounts: their location, role or interests, and how that compares with the audience your strategy targets. A large, engaged following in the wrong city or the wrong profession is a strategic problem disguised as a success.

Look also at the comments themselves. Who asks questions? Who shares your content? Are customers, prospects and the professionals you want to reach among them, or mainly other marketers, competitors and casual browsers? Pair this with a short survey or a question to recent customers about which platforms they use and where they first heard of you.

Stage 5: Operations, paid and measurement#

Social results depend heavily on how work gets done. Review the team, the workflow, approval times, tools and the relationship between organic and paid. Check whether paid campaigns use proven creative, whether conversion tracking works and whether reports lead to decisions.

Governance and security#

Audits often skip the unglamorous checks that matter most when something goes wrong. Who can publish on each account? Is two-factor authentication on? Is there a written social media policy for employees? Is there a crisis protocol, and does the team know it? Security lapses and missing protocols are cheap to fix in advance and expensive to fix during an incident; see social media crisis management.

Stage 6: Turn findings into decisions#

The output of an audit should fit on one page: a short list of decisions in four categories. Each decision needs an owner and a date. Supporting analysis can sit in an appendix for anyone who wants it.

How often to audit#

A full audit once a year is sensible for most organisations, with a lighter quarterly check on performance by series and format. Run an additional audit when strategy, team or agency changes, or when results move sharply without an obvious cause. If you are choosing a partner, an audit is a good first project; see choosing a social media agency.

Published by Fabulous.Media, a network of specialist marketing agencies. Updated 9 October 2026. Platform features change often; check current official documentation before acting on platform-specific detail.