Elevate your social media strategy: A guide to completing a 5-day social media audit.

A social media audit is essential to measure the success of your social media performance and the ideal first step for campaign creation.

Simply put a social media audit is a review of your social media performance. It is beneficial because it tells you what parts of your social media strategy are working and what needs improving. The result of this helps you refine your strategy and generate exciting new ideas.

We understand that not everyone has weeks and weeks to review every aspect of their paid social media performance. That’s why we have provided a 5-day process to help you complete a social media audit efficiently and effectively. Let’s get auditing!

First, lets get to grips with what a social media audit is

A social media audit is a series of steps taken to evaluate, review, and optimise your social media performance. It is both a subjective and objective, data-driven process where you can better understand whether your social media strategy has been successful in helping you achieve your business goals.

Performance is based on specific KPIs (these will differ depending on your goals). If your goal is to increase reach, you will measure KPIs such as follower count, engagement rates and so on. Whereas, if your goal is to generate leads, your KPIs could be link clicks and lead form completion.

‘Data’ can be overwhelming for many people but forget about the numbers for a second and think of a social media audit as a way of making sure you are doing the right things on social media and getting the outcomes you want. If your audit highlights areas for improvement, you can refine your strategy to align with this – knowledge is power, after all.

So now we’re on the same page about what an audit is, you need to know when we should conduct one.

Let’s find out, shall we?

When do you need to conduct a social media audit?

You shouldn’t think of a social media audit as a one-time thing.

At the very least, you should have a social media audit once a year but you can (and should) audit your social media performance several times throughout the business year. Carrying out audits once a quarter is a good way to gain more insights and a detailed account of your social media progress. Here are some key times when a social media audit should be considered:

Following notable periods: The social media landscape is constantly changing with new platforms, updates, and trends popping up all the time. Therefore, it is important to regularly check that your strategy is still relevant and successful.
When you want to or have changed your social media strategy: Let’s say you want to try something different such as starting a TikTok account or running paid ads on LinkedIn. Before making any quick decisions, you need to make sure you are making the right choices to help you achieve your business goals. Brands in legacy industries may not be best placed to start a TikTok as the audiences are different. Whatever the scenario, a social audit at this point can help you create a new and improved social media strategy.
Your business goals are shifting: It is common for business goals to fluctuate but if your goals have changed, your social media strategy needs to change as well. A social media audit can help you understand if any parts of your strategy will still be useful for your business or if you need to adapt the strategy entirely.

You might now be thinking ‘This all sounds great, but I don’t have endless amounts of time to complete a social media audit’.

We’re going to let you in on a marketing strategy secret; you can do a social media audit in less than a week!

Just one or two hours a day, for 5 days, and boom! You will have completed a social media audit!

How to complete a 5-day social media audit

Day 1: Prep time

Day one is all centred around preparation. You want to get all your ducks in a row to make the process easier and smoother. It can be tempting to jump straight in and start looking at the data but as Benjamin Franklin once said ‘by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ – and while he may not have been talking about a social media audit, his point still resonates

Make sure you have:

Links to social media accounts and login passwords in one place for easy access.
Access to your social media tools (analytics, scheduling, etc) – anything you use as part of your social media strategy.
A spreadsheet with all social media platform details. For all platforms, have your username, your follower count, the amount of content you have posted etc … the more information you have here, the better.

Top tip: if you don’t have an analytics tool yet, download one now! Then when it comes to completing your audit, you will be able to streamline your auditing and load historical data.

Now you are prepared, let’s get auditing.

Day 2: How to measure your social media performance

On day two, you need to ask yourself, ‘What do I want to learn from this audit and which metrics can help me with that?’

Here, you want to identify and outline your marketing goals and corresponding KPIs (e.g. what you want to achieve and which metric will show you whether you have been successful in achieving this.)
If you want to build community and engagement, you may want to measure comments, shares, reposts, likes and followers. If you want to expand your visibility, you may want to track impressions, profile views and post reach.

Top tip: Write down all your marketing goals and assign a KPI to each one.

At this point, you also want to be sure of the time frame of your audit. Are you wanting to track performance over the last quarter? Over the last 6 months? 12 months? Being clear on this is crucial: you need to think about repeatability too. If you want to only look over the last month, are you going to be able to do a social media audit every month?

Day 3: Time to get tracking

You will now be clear on what KPIs you want to track and from what time points.

If you don’t have an analytics tool and are extracting data from the social media platforms themselves, you will need to be very organised with how you organise your data. As mentioned above, having an analytics tool that does this for you is a good idea!

Have a spreadsheet with your goals, and KPIs and you can add the data to the appropriate KPI, so it is easy for you to examine the next day! If you are comparing data from one time point to another (e.g. start of the quarter to the end of the quarter), you can create some Excel formulas to calculate the percentage increase or decrease for your metrics. This gives you a clear and quick overview of what worked and what didn’t!

Day 4: Examine your findings

Once you have your data in front of you, it’s time to examine the results and interpret the findings.

If you found a decrease in your post reach, you need to know why that decrease occurred. By examining the ‘why’, you can find parts of your strategy that are working well and parts that need improving.

Let’s use post-reach as an example. You wanted to increase post reach but found an overall decrease over the quarter. You can look at posts individually and see which posts had more reach than others.

You can then find trends and patterns within the content, format and scheduling that may have affected the reach. For example, if all posts with higher reach were short-form videos with multiple hashtags in the copy, it is possible that this was a successful tactic in increasing reach. This can help inform your strategy so hopefully post reach will have improved in the next audit you complete.

You repeat that process for each metric/goal and you will be left with detailed interpretations that you can use to update your social media strategy.

Day 5: Think about your audience

It is now time to think about your audience. Reviewing audience data will help you understand which audience groups you are reaching on platforms if you are successfully reaching all the audience groups you need to and which platforms your audience is more active on.

If your target demographic is Gen Z, you need to be on platforms where they are most active. This part of your audit will help you understand where your audience is, so you can ensure you are using the right platforms in your social media strategy.

It is also possible that some of your audience is on one platform and some on another. Not all audience members will engage with social content on every platform.

Your 5-day social media audit is complete!

At this point, you can give yourself a pat on the back but the work isn’t over quite yet!

You have all these amazing insights, you need to use them and make valuable changes to your social media strategy.

We suggest creating a social media audit report. You can outline key findings, explain your audit process, break down what is working well on each platform and what needs improving and then outline your strategic recommendations.

Hopefully, this report will convince supervisors, colleagues and board members to change your social media strategy accordingly.

Quick-fire audits you can complete in no time!

Not all audits are as detailed as the one described above. You can gain some insights from quick specific audits:

Reach-centered audits: Look at top-performing posts, then look for trends and patterns across the content, and assess why certain posts are gaining more visibility.
Topic-centered audits: Categorise your posts based on campaign type, topic or post type. You can then see which posts are performing best and which category they belong to. For example, if you found all top-performing posts on Instagram were reels, then you know you should create more reel content.
Post-time audits: Look when your audience is most active online. You can then align your posting times with this to maximise engagement.

Want support with your auditing? Embryo can help.

We know how daunting auditing can be. It takes time and resources to complete a detailed social media audit. More than that, it takes expert knowledge to provide the best strategic suggestions – that is where we come in!

Embryo’s team of experts can complete a social media audit for you and provide you with invaluable insights and recommendations to ensure social media success for your business. Sound good? Get in touch with us today. We look forward to hearing from you.