How to Conduct a Social Media Audit to Improve Your SMM Strategy

Social media is deeply ingrained in modern life. The same can be said for social media marketing (SMM) — it has become second nature to brands to the point that sometimes, properly evaluating your efforts is overlooked.

Conducting a social media audit is essential to a successful social media marketing strategy. A social media audit can help you create and recalibrate your efforts so that you can optimize your SMM even further.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit, in simple terms, is a form of inventory. It lists all the assets of your brand’s social media accounts, and its main aim is to measure whether you’re meeting your SMM goals.

Through a social media audit, you can identify what’s working and what’s not. It also helps you make an informed decision on what needs to be changed in your current and future strategies.

A social media audit also ensures that your social media presence is on brand, relevant, and engaging.

Typical Coverage of a Social Media Audit Template

Part of an efficient social media audit is having a template to make things easier for you. There are several social media audit templates available online: Sprout Social, Hubspot, and Buffer — to name a few — offer free templates.

It’s important to note, however, that the content of your template highly depends on what you wish to achieve from your audit, so there is no “perfect” template.

If you wish to make a template of your own, most templates typically have the following coverage:

Audit goals:
It’s crucial to establish a set of goals for your social media audit. Your goals must be in line with your social media marketing goals. This will serve as your metrics for whether your current strategy is supporting your SMM goals.

Basic account details:
It’s best practice for your template to have different tabs or different spreadsheets for each social media account you have, especially if you have several. For each account, list down the following:

• Username and link to your social media profile
• Team/person responsible for managing the account
• Content of the “About” or “Bio” — text, hashtags, link

Audience details:
You may already know who your target audience is, but it’s still important to set different buyer personas for your social media. At the very least, list down the following:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.) of your followers
• Buyer personas/audience segments
• Latest number of followers

Account activity/engagement details:
The following details are important in measuring your account’s performance:

• Last activity (i.e., post, story, etc. — this is especially useful in determining whether one of your profiles is becoming dormant)
• Total number of posts published (per month, per quarter, or per year)
• Engagement metrics: Likes, views, shares, comments, and click-throughs
• Referral traffic
• Campaign ROI (for paid ads)

5 Tips for Successfully Conducting a Social Media Audit

1. Define your goals for your audit

As we mentioned earlier, defining your goals first and foremost will guide you on what areas you need to focus on in your social media audit. They are also the basis for your metrics. To help you get started, some common social media audit goals include:

• Boosting referral traffic and click-throughs to your website
• Growing your audience
• Increasing audience engagement (likes, shares, comments)
• Realigning your brand identity (especially if you’re rebranding)

2. Take inventory of all your social media profiles

Take inventory of all the profiles you have. This will give you a good overview of which channels are most active and which ones could use more attention. Please refer to the list of basic account details above to include in your audit template.

If you find that some of your profiles are inactive or outdated, it may be a good idea to delete them if you don’t have the capacity to maintain them. By streamlining your channels, you can focus on the ones that are most important to your business.

3. Collect data for each platform

And now onto the more in-depth part of the social media audit: data collection. You can use a variety of tools to collect data, on top of the built-in analytics offered in each platform. Some good tools to use are:

• Google Analytics: A free platform where you can track your website traffic and social media interactions.
• Hootsuite Insights: A paid platform that provides detailed analytics on your social media activity, including engagement rates and reach.
• Sprout Social: Another paid platform that offers robust analytics, including insights on your audience, engagement, and more.

4. Analyze your findings

Once you’ve gathered data for each platform, you can start to analyze it to see what’s working well and what needs improvement. Conducting a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) at this stage of your audit is helpful in getting more insights into your findings.

Dig deep into your analytics and identify your top-performing and lowest-performing posts. This will help you in re-assessing your strategy later on.

Other areas that you need to pay attention to in your audit include:

• Brand consistency: Double-check whether your social media profiles are consistent with your branding, brand message, and campaigns. Pay particular attention to your “About” and “Bio” content, profile image, banner image, hashtags, and landing pages in your “Bio.”
• Demographic data: Different platforms appeal to different types of audience — for example, the younger generation prefer to use Instagram and TikTok, while the “older” generation prefer Facebook and LinkedIn. See if your content strategy for each platform is in line with the “needs” of your audience’s demographic.

5. Identify action items and opportunities for improvement

Once you have a good understanding of where you stand in relation to your goals, you can start making plans for how to improve your social media presence.

Take note of any action items or opportunities for improvement that you come across. Some things that you may want to consider include:

• Are there any areas where your social media presence is weak?
• Do you need to create more/better content?
• Do you need to be more active on certain platforms?
• Do you need to engage more with your audience?
• Do you need to change up your approach in any way?

By identifying areas that need improvement, you can make the necessary changes and see better results from your social media efforts.

Improve Your Marketing Strategy with a Social Media Audit

Conducting a social media audit is an essential part of a solid SMM strategy. It also goes without saying that doing an audit should not be a one-off thing but should be part of your regular tasks.

You can opt to do an audit monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Whatever you do, make sure you document your progress so you can continue to measure your success over time. However, we also understand that this can be time-consuming and tedious, especially if you feel you’re lacking the experience, skills, and resources to do so.

If you need any help with your social media marketing — be it for audits, content creation, management, and optimization — Ilfusion is here for you. Call us at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!

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