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.
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?
What to record, per account
Do this for every profile the business owns, including the abandoned ones. The abandoned ones matter - they still appear in search results for your brand.
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 favouring.
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.
Judging a channel honestly
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.
Two honest outcomes are usually available and rarely taken. The first is to leave a platform entirely, keeping a claimed profile with a link so the brand name is not orphaned there. The second is to reduce a channel to a single format that demonstrably works, and stop producing everything else for it.
Questions a good social audit answers
- 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?
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.
See it built
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