How to Do a Social Media Audit

Doing a social media audit is one of the highest-impact activities you can perform to get better results from your content, yet most people skip it. It's the process of reviewing all your social media data to see what’s working, what's not, and where you can improve. This guide will walk you through a simple, step-by-step process to perform a comprehensive audit that gives you a clear playbook for success.

Step 1: Define Your Social Media Goals

You can't measure success if you haven't defined what it looks like. Before you dig into a single metric, you need to be crystal clear on what you're trying to achieve. An audit is only useful when it’s graded against your specific goals.

Vague goals like "get more followers" or "increase engagement" aren't strong enough. Tie your social media efforts to tangible business objectives. Your goals should follow the S.M.A.R.T. framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Here are a few examples of strong social media goals:

• Brand Awareness: Increase non-branded reach on Instagram by 20% in the next quarter (Q3).
• Lead Generation: Generate 150 qualified leads from LinkedIn by the end of the year through our free guide download.
• Community Engagement: Increase the average number of comments per post on our Facebook Page by 30% by October 1st.
• Web Traffic: Drive 1,000 unique website visitors from our TikTok profile link over the next 30 days.

Write down your top 1-3 goals. These will act as your north star for the entire audit process, helping you focus on the metrics that actually matter to your business.

Step 2: Track Down Every Social Media Profile

Next, you need a complete picture of your digital footprint. Your brand likely has more profiles out there than you think - some may be old, inactive, or even unofficially created by employees or fans. This step is about cataloging everything.

Get yourself a simple spreadsheet and create columns for:

• Platform (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn)
• URL
• Follower/Subscriber Count
• Who Manages It (e.g., Marketing Team, Founder)
• Last Post Date
• Notes (e.g., "Active," "Inactive," "Needs to be deleted")

Do a thorough search for your brand name on every platform imaginable, including ones you *think* you're not on. Look for variations in your name or old branding. This housekeeping step is important for brand consistency and security, allowing you to shut down any unclaimed or outdated profiles that might confuse your audience.

Step 3: Conduct a Profile Consistency and Branding Check

Now that you know where all your profiles are, it’s time to check if they present a unified brand identity. Inconsistency looks unprofessional and can dilute your brand message. For each active profile on your list, review the following elements:

• Username/Handle: Is it consistent or as close as possible across platforms?
• Profile Picture: Are you using the same, high-resolution logo everywhere?
• Cover/Header Photos: Do they reflect your current branding and campaign messaging?
• Bio/About Section: Is the description clear, concise, and optimized with relevant keywords? Does it effectively communicate who you are and what you do?
• Link in Bio: Does it direct users to a strategic destination (like your website, latest blog post, or a link-in-bio page)? Is the link working?
• Contact Information: Is your location, website, and email address up-to-date and accurate where applicable?

Each profile should feel like a cohesive part of your brand. A customer should be able to jump from your TikTok profile to your LinkedIn page and know immediately that they belong to the same company. Document any inconsistencies in your spreadsheet to fix after the audit.

Step 4: Dig into Your Audience Demographics

Are you reaching the right people? Your gut feeling might tell you one thing, but the data often tells a different story. You need to verify that your current audience matches your ideal customer persona.

Nearly every social platform provides native analytics with audience demographic data. Look for information like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location (City and Country)
• Active Times/Days

Compare the data from each platform. Does your Instagram audience skew younger than your Facebook audience? Are most of your LinkedIn followers based in a different city than you expected? Compare this information against your target persona. If you’re a local business in Boston targeting 30-45 year-olds but your data shows your biggest audience is 18-24 year-olds in Austin, you have a content alignment problem to solve.

Step 5: Analyze Your Content Performance

This is where the audit gets really interesting. Here, you'll be looking at what types of content resonate most with your audience. Don't just glance at vanity metrics like likes. Go deeper to understand what truly drives results.

Look at your posts from the last 90 days and identify the top 5 and bottom 5 performers based on meaningful metrics. The specific metrics that matter most will depend on your goals, but here are the key ones to track:

• Reach/Impressions: How many unique people saw your post?
• Engagement Rate: A single formula can be (Likes + Comments + Shares + Saves) / Reach. This tells you what percentage of people who saw a post actually interacted with it, which is often more valuable than raw engagement numbers.
• Clicks: How many times did people click the link in your post or bio?
• Views: For video content, what’s the average watch time and completion rate?
• Shares & Saves: These are powerful indicators that your content is valuable enough for people to bookmark for later or send to a friend.

Check What Formats and Topics Work

Once you’ve identified your top performers, look for patterns. Don’t just look at *what* did well, but ask *why*.

• Formats: Are short-form videos (Reels, TikToks, Shorts) getting significantly more reach? Do carousels earn more saves than single images? Does a simple text-based post on X or LinkedIn spark more conversation? This is a huge area of opportunity, as many brands are still creating content better suited for 2015 while their audience has moved on to video.
• Content Pillars/Topics: What are your posts about? Do educational tips, behind-the-scenes glimpses, or customer stories perform best? Map your highest-engagement content back to specific topics to see what your audience wants more of.
• Tone of Voice: When you're funny and casual, do you get more comments? When you're professional and authoritative, do you get more shares? Note how your tone impacts engagement across channels.

Step 6: Evaluate Channel-Specific Metrics

Blanket metrics are great, but every platform is unique. A successful LinkedIn post looks very different from a successful TikTok video. Your audit should account for these nuances.

• Instagram: Look beyond feed post likes. How are your Reels performing (views, shares, saves)? What's the tap-forward and exit rate on your Stories? Strong Story performance often indicates a highly engaged core audience.
• TikTok/YouTube Shorts: Prioritize views, watch time, and share rate. These platforms reward content that keeps people on the app longer. Also, look at what sounds or trends you used in your top-performing videos.
• X (Twitter): Focus on replies and retweets. Is your content sparking conversations or just getting passive likes? Are you using threads effectively to tell a longer story?
• LinkedIn: Pay attention to the engagement breakdown between likes, comments, and shares. High-quality comments and discussion often mean your B2B content strategy is on the right track. Also, check which of your employees’ posts get the most traction in your niche.
• Facebook: Shares and comments are the gold standard. A post with hundreds of likes but only two comments and zero shares likely didn't resonate as much as you think. Examine demographics here as well, as they are often more detailed than on other platforms.

Step 7: Conduct a Quick Competitive Analysis

You’re not auditing in a vacuum. A brief look at your competitors can provide valuable context and new ideas. Select 2-3 of your closest competitors and quickly review their presence.

You're not looking to copy them. Instead, you're asking:

• Which platforms are their strongest? If a direct competitor is getting massive engagement on TikTok and you're not even on the platform, that's a signal worth investigating.
• What content formats do they use most effectively? Are they winning with user-generated content, influencer collaborations, or high-production video?
• What kind of engagement do they get? Look at their comments. Are people asking questions and having discussions, or is it just fire emojis? This gives you an idea of their community’s health.
• Where are their weaknesses? Maybe their visual branding is messy or their response time to comments is slow. These gaps represent opportunities for you.

Spend no more than 30-60 minutes on this. The goal is to spot opportunities, not get bogged down in an exhaustive competitive report.

Step 8: Turn Your Findings into an Action Plan

An audit is pointless if you don't act on what you learned. This is the final and most important step: creating a concrete plan. Go back to your spreadsheet and add a final column called "Action Items."

For every key finding, define a next step. Frame it as "Stop," "Start," or "Continue."

Example Action Plan:

• Finding: Our LinkedIn bio is outdated and has a broken link.
  • Action: Start by updating the bio copy and fixing the link this week.
• Finding: Short-form "how-to" videos on Instagram get 3x the reach of static images.
  • Action: Continue creating "how-to" Reels and Start a new series based on our top three customer questions. Increase Reel production to twice a week.
• Finding: A text-only post on LinkedIn asking a question had our highest comment count of the quarter.
  • Action: Start posting one weekly question-based text post on LinkedIn to spur conversation.
• Finding: Our Facebook page engagement is low, and the demographics don't match our target audience.
  • Action: Stop dedicating significant resources to new Facebook content for now. Go into maintenance mode (cross-posting only) and re-allocate that time to Instagram and LinkedIn.

Your action plan becomes your new social media strategy. Schedule a time to do another audit in 3-6 months to measure the impact of your changes and continue refining your approach.

Final Thoughts

A social media audit clears out the clutter and replaces guesswork with a data-driven path forward. By regularly checking in on your goals, profiles, audience, and content, you create a powerful feedback loop that consistently improves your results over time.

Navigating this process becomes much simpler when you have all your performance data in one place instead of jumping between native analytics on five different apps. As we built Postbase, we focused heavily on creating a clean, unified analytics dashboard because we were tired of wrestling with clunky, outdated tools. Our goal is to give you a clear, instant view of what's working across all your channels - from short-form video engagement to link clicks - so you can quickly turn insights into action without getting lost in endless spreadsheets or paying for expensive reports.