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Why You Should Begin 2025 With a Thorough Social Media Audit

Social media is one of the most potent marketing channels available today. If you haven’t made a concentrated effort to connect with your target audience via social media, you’re missing out on a potentially vast audience.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram each have unique features and benefits, and you should think carefully about what kind of social media profiles resonate the most with your business goals and which platforms are most likely to attract your ideal customer base.

Like any other aspect of modern digital marketing, social media marketing requires consistent attention. It is not a “set it and forget it” marketing channel. Social media hinges on connecting with others and building relationships, so you can’t expect to sit back and let customers do all the work when it comes to social media marketing.

You must consistently engage with your audience, providing them with valuable interactions and interesting content, and keeping them interested in coming back to your social media profiles.

Occasionally, revisit your social media strategy to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

As you take your business into 2025, make a social media audit a priority for your marketing team.

What is a Social Media Audit?

A social media audit is a relatively straightforward concept: you perform a thorough review of all of your social media profiles to determine each profile’s strengths and weaknesses. You need a method of extracting valuable data trends from your social media profiles so you can analyze them and determine what works and what doesn’t with your latest social media efforts.

Social media auditing can be as simple as building a spreadsheet to track each of your social media profiles and your follower counts on each profile, follower demographics, engagement levels, and your most popular pieces of content on each profile. You can take this a step further and add more metrics based on your business’s unique goals and operational style. As you conduct your social media audits each year, you can expand the audit scope to collect the information you need to make more informed decisions about your social media marketing.

You can also leverage the analytical tools available on every social media platform to help you with your audit. For example, Twitter(X) Analytics provides an intuitive display of your tweet activity, follower engagement trends, tweet impressions, and much more in an intuitive graph format.

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Facebook offers similar tools, and you can use these graphs to track your social media performance in the timeframes you define.

What Happens During a Social Media Audit?

Once you have a detailed report of all your social media profiles, you can conduct your audit. This is a more straightforward process than it may seem at first. You basically measure how much social media engagement on each of your social media profiles generated conversions and sales.

For example, your 2019 social media audit may show that while you spent much more on Facebook marketing, your Twitter profile generated much more engagement and conversions with much lower expenditure. Now you know you don’t need to spend as much on your Facebook advertising since it doesn’t generate the expected conversions. It also shows you the potential of your Twitter profile for generating conversions and sales.

In addition to data collection and extrapolation, your social media audit should involve researching your brand on Google. Search for your company name and see what social media pages appear in the results. This is a great time to ensure there are no fake accounts impersonating your brand or people related to your company.

A social media audit is essentially a process to check that your social media marketing campaigns and profiles are working as intended and generating acceptable returns on your investments.

Social Media Audit Checklist

Here’s how to conduct a social media audit in seven simple steps:

• Goal setting: Are you conducting a social media audit to boost brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, sales, etc.? Have clear, realistic, achievable, time-bound, measurable objectives.
• Platform inventory: Establish all your official and unofficial social profiles, even for those you don’t have a set strategy for.
• Profile completeness: Ensure your profiles contain all the crucial details like your location, contact information, bio, and consistent logo usage to avoid losing potential customers to competitors and affecting your rankings.
• Performance assessment: Gauge each profile against a given set of metrics, such as followers, comments, likes, shares, conversions, and click-through rates, and identify those that need improvement.
• Content review: Check your content’s relevance, quality, and consistency and identify areas for adjustment.
• Competitor analysis: Assess the most successful competitors based on user engagement, posting frequency, post types, general response to users, response to negative feedback, brand consistency, etc.
• Action plan: Devise a strategy to improve your weaknesses to be on par with or surpass competitors and drive you closer to your objectives.

Social Media Audit Best Practices

Some tips that’ll help you do a social media audit effectively are:

• Follow a social media audit checklist/template.
• Check for data trends and patterns.
• Welcome team member input, as a colleague often spots something you missed.
• Employ your social media insights to enhance your marketing strategy.

What Are the Benefits of a Social Media Audit?

You should strive to complete at least one thorough social media audit per year for several reasons:

Discover Precise Reasons for a Failed Social Media Marketing Campaign

Different content performs differently across different platforms. Vetting KPIs (key performance indicators) against these differences allows you to pinpoint what isn’t working.

Which content gets the most negative feedback/least conversions and engagement? Is there a relation between posting times and your performance metrics? Do you have missing information impacting your click-through rate, conversions, etc.?

Identify New Opportunities to Attract Your Target Audience

A social media audit allows you to peer into what makes your top competitors so successful.

Is it their quick, personalized, and witty responses to followers? What photos, messages, themes, etc., are they using?

Replicating some of these things while adding your unique style and staying consistent with your brand may be what you need to achieve better outcomes from social media marketing.

Reduce Overhead Spending

Advertising on social media costs money, and you need to ensure that every dollar you spend generates acceptable returns. Your audit might show you that you are overspending on an underperforming social media platform or vice versa.

Establish How You Fare Against Competitors

Social media audits let you analyze your KPIs against those of competitors and see which areas you’re behind and what your competitors are doing differently that makes them successful. It provides insights into which content your competitors’ audiences like to interact with, which you can assess to see how it’s better than your posts.

Make More Informed Social Media Marketing Decisions

Once you know what’s working and what isn’t with your social media marketing campaigns, you can start rearranging them to suit your goals better. For example, suppose you discover you’ve been overspending on Facebook ads. In that case, you can divert that excess capital into other social media platforms that have been more successful or use it for other improvements to your marketing campaigns.

Increase Engagement With Your Audience

When you perform a social media audit and identify your strengths and weaknesses, you can determine the best ways to reach your audience on your different social media profiles. You might discover that one platform is much better suited to your target audience than another, and you will ultimately create better customer experiences.

Obtain Results Without Breaking the Bank

A social media audit goes for a fraction of what a comprehensive management plan costs. Hiring a reliable agency lets you spot weaknesses promptly, saving you extensive back and forth, which increases expenses. Besides, you can also conduct an audit by yourself and identify numerous ways to improve your social media content without breaking the bank.

Do I Need a Social Media Audit Agency?

A social media audit is a straightforward process with multifaceted benefits. The insights gained can help you make better social media marketing decisions in 2025 and beyond and lay the groundwork for even more detailed audits in the future.

Although you can audit your social media channels by yourself, chances are you won’t maximally identify opportunities to boost your campaigns on X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, among other platforms. Think of it as an untrained 18-year-old guard and a senior detective with 20 years of experience checking out a crime scene.

Seasoned social media management companies like Vizion Interactive have the expertise to ensure your audit is hitch-free and no stone stays unturned. Contact us ASAP to maximize the potential of your social media campaigns.