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How-To Guides Analytics & Reporting

Social Media Audit: How to Use Data to Generate Business Growth

Anda Radulescu
Andreea Udescu
Anda Radulescu, Andreea Udescu
Table of Contents

Developing a social media audit every quarter is how you keep tabs on your social media strategy plan, making sure you adjust it when you need it.

Your social media strategy relies on a list of goals and data. You have to make sure you check your social media analytics when developing a social media audit report.

To make sure you don’t miss a step, we’ll learn together how to audit your social media content and why it is important for business growth.

Social media audits: best practices and tips

  1. What is a social media audit
  2. Why it’s important to perform a social media audit
  3. How to conduct a social media audit
  1. How to enhance your social media audit with Socialinsider's Instagram listening tool
  2. Social media audit template
  3. Social media audit tools

1. What is a social media audit

A social media audit consists in a report in which you review your social media performance and strategy.

This process implies taking a good look at your brand’s social presence while analyzing every detail.

This means that you have to track the most important social media metrics and try to find new growth opportunities to explore when it comes to your brand’s social media journey.

A social media audit helps you:

  • Understand your brand’s social presence impact on its business objectives
  • Better connect with your audience
  • Provide top-notch customer care service
  • Find new opportunities to build brand awareness

This type of audit is meant to measure the effectiveness, consistency and alignment with brand goals.

2. Why it’s important to perform a social media audit

Every marketing manager should include in their monthly to-do list a social media audit to make sure their social media strategy runs smoothly.

Why? Because it enables you to quickly adjust your social strategy as you go, depending on the results.

Your audit should include social listening and social media analytics data. Here are the benefits of performing a social media audit:

  • which are the most effective social platforms
  • what your audience wants to see on each of them
  • what the demographics data says about your audience
  • what is each platform's ROI
  • what contributes to your audience’s growth
  • how the results from every social platform help you attain your goals
  • new emerging ideas that will give you a fresh perspective

But you also get:

  • Insightful metrics: understand which platforms and strategies work best for your brand
  • Enhanced strategy: adapt and refine your approach based on real data
  • Audience engagement: ensure your content resonates with your target audience, leading to increased engagement
  • Consistency maintenance: catch inconsistencies in brand messaging across platforms to maintain a unified brand image

Brands perform such audits to ensure their online presence remains relevant and resonates with their audience.

Typically, a thorough social media audit should be conducted bi-annually. However, quarterly checks can catch inconsistencies and emerging opportunities even sooner.

3. How to conduct a social media audit

Let’s get into the essential steps on how to conduct a social media audit.

From evaluating your online presence to analyzing engagement metrics, let's go over a social media checklist you need to keep in mind as you uncover insights and refine your social media strategy for optimal results.

#1 Ensure your brand is consistent across platforms

Start by compiling a list of all your social media accountsβ€”be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, or others.

For that, you’ll just need to create a Project and press Add Social Profile in the Socialinsider app.

You’ll now have an overview of all the profiles in one single dashboard.

brand overview socialinsider

One that is settled, you’ll need to assess if the profile information (bio, profile picture, cover image) is consistent across platforms.

Make sure your brand elements, such as logos and color schemes, are uniform and aligned with your brand identity.

Pro tip: Don't overlook your pinned / featured posts! Make sure posts you've highlighted a while ago are still relevant to your current strategy and brand identity.

#2 Analyze your content

Start by examining your recent posts.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Are they relevant to your audience?
  • Are they consistent with your brand message?
  • Do they align with current trends & preferences within your industry?

Next, to gain an understanding of your audience's preferences, head over to the Posts section in the dashboard.

brand posts ranked by engagement socialinsider

You can sort posts in this list by whichever metric matters more to you: engagement, engagement rate, publishing date, follower count, views, reach, impressions and so on. You can also using the filtering tool to only show results from a specific campaign.

This feature is extremely valuable, as it allows you to fine-tune both your content and hashtag strategies, ensuring that you maximize audience engagement and relevance.


#3 Learn more about your audience

Remember, it's the audience that fuels and sustains your brand's journey. Looking at your audience is another important step to take as you're building your social media audit report.

Thus, if your brand values resonate with your audience, it's a clear indicator that your content is aligning with the interests of those who matter.

Socialinsider provides information on demographic distribution so you can understand if your user persona aligns with your buyer persona.

demographics data socialinsider

Moreover, these insights allow you to pinpoint the type of content that actually converts your audience into loyal customers.

#4 Identify patterns

If you do a social media audit often enough, you will begin to see some patterns emerge - don't ignore them!

Maybe there's a common post type that your audience resonates with the most. Track this metric across multiple audit reports and you'll uncover your audience's favorite post type.

posts by type socialinsider

Over time, you might notice that your audience prefers low-production posts/videos over high-production ones.

tiktok posts socialinsider

Or, more importantly, you might discover that one channel is outperforming the rest by a wide margin. For example, if you're Spotify and engagement is a top priority for you, you might conclude that Instagram is your best-performing channel by a wide margin.

If this type of results repeats across multiple social media audits, you've got a pattern.

social profiles in socialinsider

#5 Practice success attribution

When you're working hard to build that brand awareness, increase engagement and follower count, all you want to do is see your efforts pay off.

But it's not enough to achieve social media success - you need to understand what's working and what's not, and for that you need to practice success attribution.

In other words, leverage your social media audits to uncover exactly what's bringing you the highest amount of recognition, revenue or any other metric or goal you're working towards.

#6 Keep an eye on your metrics and overall performance

When it comes to boosting your brand across various social media channels, periodic performance checks are a must.

To monitor your growth and success on each platform effectively, it's crucial to keep a detailed list of key metrics.

This includes engagement rates, the pace of follower acquisition, reach, impressions, the effectiveness of hashtags, and more.

Luckily, Socialinsider provides an all-encompassing view of your account's performance through a unified dashboard.

spotify key metrics socialinsider

If you’d like to learn more about how to use Socialinsider to track performance on each platform, you might want to check out these guides:

#7 Establish the channels that bring the most benefits

Don't be afraid to test multiple social media platforms initially.

With time, you might find that not all social media channels yield the same results, despite your best efforts.

If some platforms aren't giving you the engagement you hoped for, it's okay to pivot and focus on the platforms that truly reach your audience.

When your brand offers something visually enticing, platforms that emphasize pictures and videos, such as Instagram, are your best bet.

If you’re looking more towards audience engagement, then TikTok or X (previously known as Twitter) might be the ones for you.

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As you evaluate your social media strategy, also keep an eye out for emerging platforms that could be the next big opportunity for your brand.

#8 Perform a competitor analysis

Now that you’ve checked your insights, it’s only fair you also peek at competitors and benchmark their results against yours.

Socialinsider provides a comprehensive set of tools designed for detailed competitor analysis.

With its Benchmarks feature, users can effortlessly profile and compare their performance against competitors.

You can look into metrics such as engagement rates, views, top posts, follower counts, and beyond.

By assessing their successes and failures, you can pinpoint opportunities and areas of improvement in your own approach.

Once you’ve gained these insights, consider integrating effective tactics into your strategy.

While many ideas have been explored, you have the unique ability to reframe them with your distinct voice and brand story.

However, always remember to maintain your authenticity.

Your unique voice is what sets you apart, and it’s crucial to let that shine through.

#9 Analyze your findings

Based on your findings, create a list of actionable recommendations.

These might include refining your content strategy, optimizing posting times, or investing more in platforms that yield better results.

After going through the steps of a social media audit, it's now time to analyze what you've found, draw meaningful conclusions, and craft an actionable plan to improve your brand's social media presence.

Here's a deeper dive into drawing your conclusions and formulating an action plan.

Before diving into recommendations, take a moment to evaluate what the data is really telling you.

For instance:

  • Which platforms are driving the most traffic or conversions?
  • What types of content are generating the most engagement or shares?
  • Are there any noticeable patterns in the posting times that correlate with higher engagement?

Your recommendations should always be in line with your broader business goals. If your main aim is brand awareness, then growing followers might be a priority.

If it's conversions, then improving the click-through rate from your posts might be the focus.

#10 Adjust your strategy accordingly

Now that you have a list of recommendations, prioritize them and set clear, measurable goals for each.

For instance:

  • Increase TikTok engagement by 15% over the next quarter
  • Test three new content formats on Instagram within two months
  • Reduce posting frequency on Twitter and monitor impact over six weeks

4. How to enhance your social media audit with Socialinsider's Instagram Listening tool

If you’ve reached this point, you think you have everything you need, packed with data on how to perform a social media audit. However, you may still have some missing puzzle pieces.

The missing piece is social media listening. You need the social listening tool to find out what users say about your brand, products and services on social media.

For the purpose of this analysis, I added the hashtag #psl into our tool (which, as you might already know, stands for Pumpkin Spice Latte, everybody's favorite Starbucks drink and one of their most successful recurring campaigns).

I decided to download the social listening report to get all the unified data. The key metrics I got for the last six months include the total number of posts, total engagement, total reach and even the total number of creators who used it.

You can also see which KPIs have increased during the selected time frame.

screenshot from a socialinsider social listening report for the hashtag #psl for starbucks with key metrics

Next, you get to see how many posts using the hashtag #psl have been posted by creators and by individuals.

screenshot from a socialinsider social listening report for the hashtag #psl for starbucks with posts evolution

The important part to check about a branded hashtag is the list of topics/intersts related to it. Since Starbucks’ PSL refers to Pumpkin Spice Latte, the intent was to use it in Instagram posts about coffee.

It seems that people use the #psl hashtag also in topics related to sports and family.

However, these topics are still related to foods and drinks, since people tend to enjoy their favourite coffee while watching sports or when spending time with their families.

The main topic in which the hashtag is used it’s actually the one intended by the popular coffee brand.

screenshot from a socialinsider social listening report for the hashtag #psl for starbucks with topics

With all this data you can retrieve about your social media platforms’ performance by using the right tool, you can easily comply your social media audit and then adjust your strategy accordingly, while also assessing your goals.

5. Social media audit template

Sometimes having a look at a step-by-step guide on how to perform a social media audit is nothing without social media audit examples or a social media audit template.

Well, today we’re on a mission to save all marketing managers who run against the clock to fulfill their tasks.

Here is our social media audit template where you can see exactly what KPIs you need to keep an eye on and how to analyze your performance.

It’s important to keep in mind that this template for social media audit cannot be edited. You have to make a copy in order to complete your own data.

6. Social media audit tools

Why complicate your work when great people have invented means to make it all easier? You can make use of social media audit tools to prevent making mistakes, especially if you are new at this.

Social media audit tools can provide you all the insights and social media metrics you need to see how your posts perform on every social media platform you own.

We put together a list of social media tools that could really make you feel relieved.

1.Socialinsider - This is your go-to free social media audit tool when it comes to useful metrics and insights on a specific time period. You can even use it to compare your performance to one of your competitor’s.

2.Sprout Social - It’s a social media analytics tool that help you see in-depth data about your posts on several social media channels.

3.Hootsuite - By using this tool, it is easier for you to make up reports including all the data you need for a social media audit.

4.Sociality.io - This app offers you access to reports that can help you see the greater picture when it comes to what your audience likes about the whole industry.

5.Unmetric - This is a social media analytics tool which provides several metrics, more than you can find in the native apps. This way, you will know better what should be your next step to improve your strategy.

Final thoughts

Using the right social media tools can help you easily conduct a social media audit to assess your brand's overall performance on all social media platforms.

It's important to find out on which social media networks to focus more in the future base on your results and KPIs values.

Define your business goals once more after performing the social media audit and establish the changes you need to implement in your strategy to make it work better.


Frequently Asked Questions

1.What is 5S audit checklist?

The 5S framework, developed and popularized in Japan, provides five key steps for maintaining an efficient workspace in order to improve the quality of products. In Japanese, these steps are known as seiri (Sort), seiton (Set in order), seiso (Shine), seiketsu (Standardize), and shitsuke (Sustain).

2.What are the 7 audit objectives?

Performance aspects include: economy, efficiency, effectiveness, compliance, accuracy, completeness, and timeliness.

3. What are the 12 auditing principles?

The basic principles of auditing are confidentiality, integrity, objectivity, independence, skills and competence, work performed by others, documentation, planning, audit evidence, accounting system and internal control, and audit reporting.

Anda Radulescu

Anda Radulescu

Find me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anda-elena/

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