How To Conduct a Social Media Audit: 7 Easy Steps

As an influencer, it’s essential to know how well your posts perform so you can concentrate on making content your audience enjoys most. The best way to understand your track record is by running a social media audit. During this process, you’ll examine your social media posts’ metrics to see how engaging your uploads are.

Read on to learn how to conduct effective social media audits.

What’s a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit involves reviewing your uploads to make sure your audience finds them interesting. To do this, you’ll need to check your social media metrics, such as engagement rate and reach. 

Several platforms have built-in tools that track how well a post performs, but you can also monitor your profiles through third-party software. 

Anyone looking to grow their social media presence can benefit from this process. Whether you’re interested in creating viral marketing campaigns or just getting a few new followers, an audit can tell you what part of your content strategy works best. 

It’s best practice to conduct a social media audit every three months. This gives you enough data to spot trends and change your upload style if necessary.

Why Conduct a Social Media Audit?

Social media audits tell you which posting strategies are working so you can focus your efforts on them. Here are a few additional benefits of this process.

Understand Your Audience

An audit will help you determine who engages with your content most often. Social media platforms often track demographics, which is information about your audience. For instance, this data can include your viewers’ gender, age, and location. 

Once you have a better idea of who your audience is, you can tailor your content to target them more easily. If you want to expand your reach beyond these viewers, consider trying a new platform or content type.

Make Informed Decisions

When you see engagement patterns, you can make data-driven decisions about what to post in the future.

Say you launch a campaign to sell your new self-published book. You post a video with a quick plot summary on both TikTok and Instagram. After doing a social media audit, you notice the video got five times more engagement on TikTok. With that knowledge, you’d know to focus your energy on the platform’s BookTok community. 

Identify Copycat Profiles

Anyone who gains traction on social media will likely encounter fake profiles at one point or another. Some just repost videos hoping to gain their own following, while others may attempt to scam viewers with fake giveaways or links. 

Part of an audit is finding all your active profiles, whether you made them or not. If you come across a fake account, report it to the social media platform so they can take it down. It may also be a good idea to make a quick video or community post telling your viewers to be wary of copycat profiles. As a final step, try to get each of your accounts verified so people can tell you’re the real deal more easily.

How To Do a Social Media Audit: 7 Steps

Here are seven important steps for conducting an effective social media audit. 

1. Evaluate or Reevaluate Your Goals

You may have started creating content without a clear goal in mind, or perhaps your priorities have changed since you began. No matter the case, a social media audit is a good opportunity to refocus and decide on your brand or business's objective.

Say your original goal was to reach 100,000 followers. After hitting that milestone, you might increase this aim to 500,000. Understanding this objective will tell you which metrics to track in your audit — in this case, reach and audience growth rate might be the most helpful. 

2. Create Your Social Media Audit Checklist

Make a social media audit checklist to outline all the metrics you want to evaluate. These data points should align with your new or existing goals. Staying organized will make audits faster and prevent you from getting overwhelmed with unnecessary information.

3. Review Your Social Media Profiles

Take an inventory of your social media profiles so you can keep track of where you’re actively posting. This also lets you identify copycat accounts that are stealing your content and likeness. To prevent unauthorized access to your profiles, make sure all your login credentials are in one place and check who can upload to your accounts. 

4. Look for New Social Media Platforms

After figuring out where you already post, you may realize there’s a platform out there you haven’t tried yet. For instance, if you make YouTube Shorts about human resources, consider posting this content on a more business-focused platform like LinkedIn. This community is full of HR professionals, so they’re likely to find your posts engaging. By creating new accounts, you can expand your reach across social media channels.

5. Solidify Your Brand Identity 

Your brand needs to be consistent for it to be recognizable and memorable. So, make sure your visuals, bios, and tone are the same across all your posts and platforms. 

This is also a good opportunity to update your branding if it no longer suits your content. Perhaps a new profile picture is in order, or maybe you have new links to share in your bio.

6. Identify Top Performing Social Media Posts

Use built-in or third-party analytics to determine which posts receive the most engagement. These tools will help you identify what made these posts successful, like timing, topic, and format. With that information in hand, you can continue creating the content that performs best on social media algorithms.

7. Monitor Competitor Performance

Follow other content creators or brands in your niche to see which of their posts are performing well and which aren’t. Learning from competitors’ successes and failures will help you identify trends to hop on and pitfalls to avoid. 

For example, maybe they uploaded funny bloopers that increased engagement rates, or their how-to videos went viral. With this information, you can consider making posts in a similar style.

Example of an Effective Social Media Audit 

Here’s an example of a social media audit for a fictional content creator, Quaffee-knows. He’s a professional coffee taster who recommends new blends and runs coffee-tasting courses. When he noticed a dip in engagement and fewer bookings, he conducted a social media audit to figure out why. As a result, he found out that:

• Engagement dropped on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) by 63% last month. 
• View counts increased for posts with video content. These generated the most shares and positive comments from followers.
• Branding wasn’t consistent across all platforms. For example, he needed to update his professional logo on Instagram and LinkedIn. 
• Competitors changed posting styles to explore humorous blooper posts, which seemed to go viral within days.

Based on these insights, Quaffee decided to change his social media strategy in the following ways:

• Platform refocus — He put more energy into platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube since short-form videos performed best. 
• Brand consistency — He gave his profiles a consistent look and feel across all platforms. 
• Trend adoption — After realizing blooper videos did so well, Quaffee-knows decided to leave in occasional coffee spills to capitalize on viral coffee-related humor. 

In this example, the social media audit paid off. By using a checklist and scanning tools, Quaffee was able to spot what was working and what wasn’t. This helped him refocus and keep a closer eye on trends.

Create, Manage, and Publish Content With AI

Regular social media audits are essential to help you refine your social media approach. By analyzing your performance, you can make sure you’re staying current with trends and platform developments. Doing your first website scan and content analysis is a crucial step toward growing your brand.

Once you’ve completed your audit, AI features like Captions’ Social Studio make it easier to drive results. This tool pulls data directly from your site to create personalized content plans. It can generate custom scripts, create engaging videos using AI avatars, and schedule posts at the best times for your audience.

Let Captions manage your social media presence.