Guide
The social media audit template
The point of a social audit is not a slide of follower counts. It is to decide which channels deserve next quarter's hours - including the ones that deserve none.
Why most social audits change nothing
Most social audits produce a document that describes the current state accurately and changes nothing. The failure is structural: they measure activity rather than answering a question. The question is always the same - given a fixed number of hours next quarter, where should they go?
Everything below is arranged to answer that one question. If a check does not eventually feed into it, it is in the appendix or it is not in the audit.
What to record for every account you own
Do this for every profile the business owns, including the abandoned ones. The abandoned ones matter more than people expect: they still rank for your brand name, they still collect messages nobody answers, and somebody still has the password.
The account itself
- Handle, URL, and who has access - including former employees.
- Profile image, bio and link current and consistent across platforms.
- Verified or not, and whether the account is a duplicate of another.
- Last posted date. Anything dormant more than a quarter needs a decision.
Audience
- Follower count and, more usefully, the trend over the last year.
- Whether the audience matches the customer - not just in size but in who they are.
- Which posts brought followers in, if that is knowable.
Content and engagement
- Posting frequency actually achieved, against what was planned.
- The five best and five worst performing posts, and what distinguishes them.
- Engagement rate against reach, not against follower count.
- Format mix, and which formats the platform is currently favoring.
The part that decides everything
- Traffic to the site from this channel.
- Inquiries or sign-ups attributable to it, however roughly.
- Hours spent per month producing for it.
- Value per hour, even as a wide range. This is the number the audit exists to produce.
The one number the whole audit exists to produce
Every row above feeds one figure: what an hour spent on this channel is worth. It is the number that makes the audit a decision rather than a description, and it is the one most audits leave out because it is uncomfortable to produce.
Impressions
The number every platform shows you first, and the one least connected to anything. Record it, do not decide on it.
Traffic to the site
The first number that costs the audience something. This is where most channels start looking different from each other.
Inquiries
People who asked. Attribute roughly rather than not at all - "how did you hear about us" on the intake form is imperfect and much better than nothing.
Customers
Divide by hours spent. That is the number the audit exists to produce, and the one that ends arguments about which channel to drop.
Hours are the input people forget to record, and they are usually the biggest cost in the whole exercise. Count production time, not posting time: the shoot, the edit, the approvals, the three drafts of the caption, the community management afterwards. A channel that looks free because nobody invoices for it can easily be the most expensive one in the audit.
Attribute imperfectly rather than not at all. Perfect attribution does not exist on social and waiting for it is how businesses end up deciding on impressions. A rough range, stated as a range, beats an exact number for a metric that does not matter.
Judge a channel honestly, including the ones you like
The hardest part of this audit is not the arithmetic. It is that somebody in the room built the channel that is about to be cut, and the audit has to survive that.
A channel earns its place if it produces customers, produces demonstrable awareness among people who become customers, or serves as a support surface people actually use. Everything else is a hobby the business is paying for, and saying so is the job.
Two defenses come up and both deserve a straight answer. "It is brand building" is sometimes true, and the test is whether people who became customers mention the channel or show up having seen it - if nobody can produce a single instance, it is not brand building, it is posting. "Our competitors are there" is not a reason; it is an observation about their hours, not yours.
Where a channel genuinely is early, say that and put a date on it. "Six more months, then we decide" is a defensible position. "It takes time" without a date is how a channel survives four consecutive audits.
The two honest outcomes almost nobody takes
Most social audits end in "post more consistently", which is not a decision. Two better endings are usually available, and both free up more time than any efficiency you could find inside the current plan.
- Leave the platform. Keep a claimed profile with a current bio and a link, so the brand name is not orphaned and nobody else takes the handle, then stop producing for it. A dormant profile that points somewhere useful costs nothing; a half-hearted posting schedule costs a day a month and signals neglect just as clearly.
- Reduce the channel to the one format that works. Almost every account has a format that outperforms everything else by a distance, and almost every account keeps producing the other four because the calendar has slots for them. Cut to the one, at the frequency you can actually sustain, and spend the recovered hours on the channel that was earning.
The questions a finished audit can answer out loud
A good test before you present: can you answer these five without opening the spreadsheet? If not, the audit has recorded rather than concluded.
- Which channel produced customers, not impressions, in the last twelve months?
- What would happen if we stopped posting on the weakest channel entirely?
- Which single format outperformed everything else, and could we do only that?
- Where are competitors getting engagement that we are not, and is it a format or an audience difference?
- Which accounts exist that nobody is managing, and who still has the password?
- If we had half the hours next quarter, which channel would we keep?
Deal with the accounts nobody is managing
This is the least interesting chapter and the one that most often turns up something urgent. Old accounts are a brand problem, a support problem and a security problem at the same time, and no single department owns any of the three.
- Search your brand name on each major platform, not just the accounts you know about. Old campaign accounts, regional accounts and accounts set up by an agency you no longer use all rank for your name.
- Check who has access, then check whether those people still work there. Access that outlived employment is the most common finding in this section and the one nobody wants to write down.
- Read the unanswered messages. Dormant accounts collect inquiries, and some of them are from people who assumed they had contacted you and concluded you do not reply.
- Decide per account: reclaim and use, reclaim and park with a link, or close. Parking is usually right, and it takes ten minutes.
Turn the audit into the thing that wins the client
If you do this for other people rather than for yourself, the audit is also your best sales asset - and the same ceiling applies to it as applies to every free consultation.
A specific read on somebody's own accounts is far more persuasive than any case study, because it is about them. The problem is that doing one properly takes hours, so it gets rationed to the prospects who already look likely - which means the ones who most needed convincing never receive the thing that would have convinced them.
The way out is to separate what you collect from what you judge. A short set of questions collects what actually changes your read: which platforms they are on, who they sell to, what they have tried, how many hours a month it costs them. Your judgment is already written down - the five things you always find, the formats you always recommend, the channels you tell people to leave. Put those together and a first read can be prepared for every inquiry rather than the promising few.
The full audit stays the paid engagement. What changes is that the conversation about buying it starts after they have read your thinking rather than before it.
Common questions
- How often should you do a social media audit?
- Quarterly for the numbers, annually for the strategic question of which platforms to be on at all.
- What should a social media audit include?
- Every owned account, its audience trend, its content performance, and - the part most audits omit - the hours it costs and the customers it produced.
- Is it worth auditing dormant accounts?
- Yes. They rank for your brand name, they collect messages nobody answers, and they are a security exposure when the person who set them up has left.
- What metrics belong in a social media audit?
- Follower trend rather than follower count, engagement against reach rather than against followers, traffic to the site, inquiries however roughly attributed, and hours spent producing. The last one is the one most audits omit and the one that turns the rest into a decision.
- Should the audit include competitor accounts?
- Include two or three, and look for one specific thing: whether they are getting engagement from a format you are not using, or from an audience you are not reaching. Those are different problems with different answers. A general competitive sweep produces slides rather than decisions.
- How do I attribute customers to a social channel?
- Imperfectly, and on purpose. Tag the links you control, ask on the intake form, and read the replies. Every one of those undercounts, which is fine as long as you undercount every channel the same way - you are ranking them against each other, not reporting to a regulator.
- What does a social media audit cost?
- It depends almost entirely on how many accounts there are and whether anyone has recorded hours before. Two or three accounts with decent records is a day. A dozen accounts across three regions with nobody tracking production time is a week, and most of that week is finding the hours rather than analyzing them.
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