How to Conduct a Social Media Audit

First, let’s define what a social media audit is exactly.

Sprout Social describes a social media audit as:

“the process of reviewing your business’ metrics to assess growth, opportunities, and what can be done to improve your social presence.”

And that’s a decent definition! But what does that really mean?

Well, the main reasons we conduct a social media audit are to learn the following 3 things:

1. How many followers am I gaining each month?
2. Are my followers engaging with my content?
3. Am I gaining or losing money from my social media strategy?

Why Are These Social Media Metrics Important?

Well, the first two metrics (your follower growth and engagement rate) will tell you if the content you are producing is valuable to your audience or not.

Depending on the nature of your business, “value” will mean different things.

This is because it depends on what your target audience thinks is valuable to receive from you.

For example, value to your audience could mean…

• free sample size products
• free trials on your service
• helpful advice or information that enables your audience to accomplish something
• or something as simple as entertainment, like is your content funny?

Determining which social media posts have the most engagement (likes and comments), will tell you what your audience likes seeing from you the most.

Understanding this kind of information is beneficial for you to know and apply across the board, not just when creating your social media campaigns.

All of your content and ads should be created with your target audience in mind.

Now, the last metric we talked about, “am I gaining or losing money from my social media strategy?” probably doesn’t need an explanation as to why it’s essential.

But, you’d be surprised at how many people fail to actually measure this!

If you’re investing money or time into a digital marketing strategy, you want to know that it’s paying off.

So, now the question is how can you tell?

How Do You Perform A Social Media Audit?

Well, we’re going to show you a couple of ways.

If you use a scheduling platform like:

• Social Report

• Hootsuite

• Later

…and etc. they often come with their own analytics built-in for you to look at.

But let’s say you don’t have social media scheduling software or analytics software. What can you do?

Well, you can always check the social media platform itself for analytics.

Now, the most popular social media scheduler tools will usually give you more insight, but you usually pay for it with a pricing plan.

So let’s look at what the social media platforms are offering for free.

How To Use Social Media Platforms Free Analytics

1. Instagram

Let’s start by looking at our Instagram account as an example.

Because we’re a business account, we see the option to view Insights on our profile page.

When we tap that, it gives us an account overview of the most essential Instagram metrics to review. And we can toggle between viewing the last 7 days and the last 30 days.

It shows us accounts reached, content interactions, and you can take a deeper dive into looking at your audience and content shared.

In your audience analytics, you can learn more about their demographics, what hours or days of the week they’re most active on the app, and more.

In your content shared analytics, you can filter to see which posts had the most engagement in a given time frame.

You can filter by likes, reach, impressions and so much more. You can also then filter by videos, photos, carousels, etc.

You can also look at individual post analytics by tapping on any post and tapping View Insights.

Similarly, you’ll see that other social media platforms all have their own built-in analytics dashboards for businesses.

2. Pinterest

Here is a quick look at Pinterest’s analytics.

3. Facebook

And this is what Facebook page analytics look like.

4. Twitter

For Twitter, here’s an example of their analytics.

5. LinkedIn

Finally, for LinkedIn analytics, this is what you can see.

And if you’re running paid social media ad campaigns on any of these platforms, they usually have a whole separate analytics dashboard just for your ads.

For instance…

• Facebook has Ads Manager

• LinkedIn has Campaign Manager

• Twitter has Twitter Ads

• Pinterest has Pinterest Ads

So that’s where you can find all of the information, now what do you do with it? How do you conduct a social media audit using these social media KPIs?

Tips On Using Metrics For Your Social Media Audit

Well, at a minimum you can calculate it the old fashioned way.

And that is by using an excel sheet or Google sheet and a calculator.

Or you might not even need the calculator if you’re a pro with excel sheet formulas!

What you’ll want to do is start inputting your metrics for each platform, each month.

Then over time, you can start calculating how many followers you typically gain a month on average, if your engagement rate is increasing or decreasing, etc.

Studying these numbers over time will tell you if what you’re currently doing is producing the desired results or not.

You can do the same thing with your ad spend.

Some social media advertising platforms are more advanced than others.

But at minimum, you should be able to see how much you have spent for engagement, leads, conversions, etc.

The only trick with tracking revenue from social media ad platforms is that you do have to set up conversion tracking first.

But for now, assuming that your ad account is set up properly, your ad account will show you the money spent vs the money made from any given campaign.

This takes all of the guesswork out of wondering if what you’re doing on social media is paying off or not.

You can see the numbers in your analytics plain as day!

Now the last tip we’ll share, is that before you do anything, you need to first determine your social media goals are.

What are you auditing?

When you get our social media marketing services, we typically look at our follower growth, engagement rate, and ROAS (which means Return On Ad Spend).

But you first need to determine what’s important to you.

Additional Social Media Metrics To Track

Here are some additional metrics you can track that can fall under the umbrella of engagement metrics to audit:

• Times that you publish your posts (what days and times perform best?)
• Video views (what’s the cost per view? which videos are performing best?)
• Link clicks from your social media pages to your website (what’s your CTR?)
• The number of tags or mentions you get (how many people are tagging your account in their posts?)

Now, some less obvious things to audit for may be less metric-related and more quality-related. Here are some examples:

• Did all my posts publish correctly and as planned this month?
• Are we seeing a lot of grammatical and spelling errors in our content?
• Are all of the comments and direct messages we receive getting responded to properly and in a timely manner?
• Are the comments we’re receiving positive or negative?
• Is our profile bio filled out appropriately?
• Do all of the links on my social media page work?
• Do all of my social media pages look consistent and unified under one brand?

Again, you’ll want to decide what you want to audit your social media for based on your specific goals.

But in general, a social media audit helps you identify areas of opportunity.

Conducting a social media audit gives you better insight into what you need to change in order to achieve your goals.

Quick Recap

Now, let’s go ahead and recap what we’ve learned in today’s post.

A social media audit is defined as:

“the process of reviewing your business’ metrics to assess growth, opportunities and what can be done to improve your social presence.”

Common metrics that are used to audit your social media are your follower growth, engagement rate, and ROAS.

You can use third-party analytics software to track your data or use the analytics available within the social media platforms themselves.

Additional metrics you can track based on what your social media goals are engagement and quality-related metrics.

We hope that this post answered your question on how to conduct a social media audit.

If after doing your social media audit, you’re thinking of taking your social media marketing to the next level, we’ve got your back.

Book a meeting today and we’ll help you reach that goal!