A social media audit is a process of carrying out a health check on your social media activity. You can learn a lot from taking the time to review and analyze your key metrics, yet so many businesses don’t dedicate the necessary time to assess their performance of their social media.

Carrying out a social media audit involves evaluating which social media marketing tactics are performing well and need adjustment. If you find that something isn’t working, you can take the steps to fix it. If something is going well then you can focus more time, energy and budget on making it more prominent within your social media strategy.

So how do you perform a social media audit on your activity? Here are 5 important questions to ask.  

1. What are your social media platforms doing for you? 

It’s important to think about what you are trying to achieve with your social media channels and begin to assess whether your platforms are helping you to hit those objectives. Are posts driving huge engagement to help promote your brand? Is each platform helping to drive people back to your website, where they are converting into leads? Are you tracking sales through your Facebook advertising? Without understanding what you want to achieve from social media it becomes hard to audit whether it is actually working for you.  

2. Who is your audience? 

It’s essential to understand who your social media following actually are. Remember, they might be slightly different from your offline audience. You can find out demographic data within the platform insights for free, and there are tools including FollowerWonk and Hype Auditor to analyse your Twitter and Instagram followers.  

3. Which content is achieving the greatest engagement?

Review what kind of content is working best for your business regularly. Typically video will perform best on Facebook due to the algorithm favouring this type of content at the moment. Have you fallen into the trap of posting the same content type over and over (for example a link post)? Have you tried a slideshow, carousel or poll?

Over on Instagram, is it a single image or multiple image post that work better? Have you tested video content on Instagram yet?

4. How many visits are your profiles getting? 

Facebook and Instagram both offer the metric to show you how many profiles visits you receive. This is a great metrics to use for auditing as it offers so much more insight than just followers. The Page and Profile visit statistics indicate how many people have actually opted to look at your profiles from seeing your activity in the newsfeed or from actively searching for your profile. Look out for peaks in visitors and match these to business events or promotions you are running. If you visit numbers are low – you need to work harder at driving people back to your profiles.

5. Which days and times are your audience online?

There might be clear times of day, and days of the week which your audience tend to be on Facebook and Instagram. The platforms will analyse your followers and will assess the average times and days when your followers are most active. Look for peaks and plan for your posts to go out just before these times. For example, if your audience peak is at 9 pm, you should post around 7-8 pm to ensure the update has seeded into the algorithm.

Don’t just stick to when suits you to post. Think about when your audience would be most likely to engage with the content you are posting. We recommend using a scheduling tool like Buffer, which allows you to schedule a calendar of content in advance – and also offers you metrics on how many clicks and engagement you receive.

We recommend reviewing and analysing your social media regularly, to ensure everything is on track and you are meeting your goals. It’s also one of the most valuable ways of understanding your audience and their content preferences.  

Performing detailed social media audits is one of our favourite services at Avocado Social. We carry out full audits including competitor analysis, to help you to adjust your approach based on our findings.