How to carry out a quick social media audit

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I like to go over all my statistics regularly to see how my small business performs on social media. From a content creation and content marketing angle it’s crucial to know where you should focus your efforts and what type of content your audience actually loves to see and read from you.

Today I’m sharing the exact method I use for my quarterly and year-end social media audits.

If you’re a newbie business owner and haven’t used social media platforms to advertise your business yet, save this post for later and come back once you have more data to look at.

If social media is part of your digital marketing strategy since a while, you may audit your performance more frequently, like bi-monthly. It depends on how many times you post or share content on your selected platforms. That way you can quickly spot positive (or negative) trends and you can take action right in time.

Grab a piece of paper or open up a blank document on your laptop as I walk you through the steps. Ready? Then let’s go!


Are you in a hurry? Sign up to my email list and grab it as handy PDF with a fill-in-the-blank workbook.

1: Which social media platforms do you use for your business?

The first step of the mini audit is to take note of all the social media platforms that you’re on and used during the year for business purposes to talk about your services, products or blog:

  • Instagram feed and stories
  • Facebook page, group and stories
  • Messenger
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Snapchat
  • TikTok
  • WhatsApp
  • …

2: Do you like being on these social platforms?

Now that you’ve your ultimate list, add a few lines of notes to each platform about how do you feel being there. Be honest with yourself. There’s no right or wrong answer here.

  • Does it bring you joy?
  • Are you looking forward to post, comment, engage on the platform?
  • Do you think you were successful?
  • Or does it feel like a burden?
  • Like wasted time and energy?
  • Are you doing it only because of FOMO?
  • What if someone from that platform could turn out to be a prospective client?

3: How did your business perform on your social media platform?

As you have clarified your personal feelings about the platforms, the next step of the social media audit is to look at your business performance objectively. What do the numbers tell?

Every platform has some kind of built-in analytics, so go there and look at things like the following:

  • How many followers, subscribers, contacts, members etc. do you have on the platform?
  • What were your top 5 best performing posts on each platform, getting the most
    • engagement
    • likes
    • comments
    • saves
    • shares
    • views
    • …
  • How do these top performing social posts, entries look like? Are there any commonalities?
    • Did your video posts do better?
    • Or was it posts with photos?
    • Maybe posts with captions only?
    • What about quotes graphics?
    • What seems to be the ideal length of videos?
    • Do short captions spark better engagement than long ones?
    • Did you use emojis in these posts?
    • …
  • What were the 5 worst performing social posts, videos, etc.? what could have caused their bad performance?
    • Was it timing?
    • Maybe the content itself?
    • The length of the video or post?
    • Weird, blurry images?
    • …
    • Learn from them and aim to do less (none) of those.

Based on all this data, which social platforms do get the most positive engagement?

4: Who are your fans?

While you look at your social media analytics, if it stores data about your followers, fans, subscribers, viewers, take a look at those figures as well:

  • What is the split between women and men?
  • What is their age range?
  • What are the top locations (country, city)?
  • What are the top languages?
  • …

Is it what you’ve expected? Do they represent on this level your ideal client/customer base? If not so much, you’ve got a lot to do, as you seem to attract the wrong crowd.

Why this could have happened? If you’re in the habit of asking (random) people to like your page. Be it on your own social media channels or in let’s say Facebook groups in follow-me-like-me-threads. No worries I did the same but not anymore. You always learn from your mistakes. This could lead to attracting the wrong kind of people. And with that I mean wrong for your business. As in not your actual ideal clients and like-minded fans.

The next step of the social media mini audit takes us to Google Analytics.

5: What does Google Analytics have to say?

I know, I know. I said this is a social media audit, but bear with me and check your website’s metrics in Google Analytics (GA). Do the following:

  • Login to your GA account
  • Go to the Acquisition report’s Overview section
  • Set a relevant date range (If you’re doing a yearly review then set the data range to a yearly period)
  • Look at your Top Channels

For me social media was the main channel to drive traffic back to my site.

Now let’s dig a bit deeper by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Default channel grouping > Social:

  • Which social channels are generating the most traffic to your website?
  • Where do your users come from?
  • What generates the highest number of sessions and page views?
  • What is the average session duration after they land on your page from the social platform?
  • What is the Pages/Session ratio?

For me the top performing channels are:

  • Facebook: with highest number of sessions and page views.
  • Pinterest: second highest number of sessions, but third place only in terms of page views.
  • Instagram: third highest number of sessions and second place in terms of page views.
  • LinkedIn, and Twitter: have marginal success as I didn’t use them actively.
    • That they show up on my report at all is due to the fact that I know of people having shared some of my content on those platforms. A belated Thank You to you guys!

When I analyze the average session duration and pages/session ratios the picture changes slightly:

  • Instagram: is on top in both cases.
  • Facebook: comes in second.
  • Pinterest: catches the third place.

Social Media Audit completed, what to do with the data? 

In an ideal world you’d be on as many social platforms as possible. That way you can reach a bigger audience and therefore a bigger circle of potential clients and customers. And who wouldn’t want that?

But it’s not an ideal world. If you’re a small business owner like me you need to carefully plan where you spend your precious time and efforts for a maximum return on investment (ROI). You started your business to make profit, haven’t you?

How to use this data you’ve collected during the social media mini audit?

Pick one or two social media platforms:

  • you enjoy being on,
  • where your ideal client base hangs on,
  • that have a high positive engagement rate, and that
  • drives a good amount of traffic back to your website.

For example my business decisions are to

  • focus my social media efforts in 2020 on Facebook and Instagram. They are the best performing platforms that I also like myself to use. It doesn’t feel like a burden.
  • use the insights I gained about best performing posts on these platform, and continue creating similar content to keep engagement levels high and to grow my fans.
  • post less of those types of social media posts that didn’t do well for my audience. Posting less, but with higher quality has a better ROI.

And last but not least, knowing what type of content my audience likes on social media, can also help when it comes to blog content planning and creation for my website. Because once they come over from social media, my goal is to keep them there as long as possible. That way they can get familiar with my business and services, and even if they are not ready to hire me yet, I will remain on their radar when the timing is right for them.

Do you know of someone who could use this material? Share the word with them and don’t forget to pin this post to your boards!

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