A social media audit is a structured review of every social account a brand owns, checking how each profile looks, how its posts performed over a fixed period, how that compares with industry numbers and competitors, and what to keep, fix or stop. For a small business or a single agency client, you can do one in 2 to 3 hours: list the accounts, pull 90 days of data from each network's own analytics, compare it with benchmarks, and write a one-page summary with a 30-day plan.

By the end of this guide you'll have a finished audit, a report your client will actually read, and a fix plan for the next month.

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit answers four questions about a brand's social presence at one point in time:

1. What do we own? Every account, including old ones nobody logs into.
2. Does it look right? Names, handles, bios, links and photos that match across networks.
3. What is working? Which networks, formats and topics drive reach, engagement, clicks and leads.
4. What should change? A short list of decisions, with owners and dates.

An audit is not a monthly report. A report tracks progress against goals you already set (see our social media report template). An audit asks whether the goals, networks and content are right in the first place, and its output feeds your social media strategy.

How often should you do a social media audit?

Run a full audit once a quarter, and a light version (steps 1, 2 and 9 only) once a month if you manage several clients. Also run a full audit in these cases:

• You take on a new client or a new brand.
• Results drop for 4 weeks in a row with no obvious cause.
• The brand changes its name, logo, offer or target customer.
• A new staff member or agency takes over the accounts.

Ninety days gives you enough posts (usually 30 to 60 per network) to see patterns while the findings are still current.

What you need before you start

Get admin access to every account, the brand's social goals in one line each (for example, "book 20 trial classes a month from Instagram"), the template below, the names of 3 competitors, and website analytics access if you want to count clicks and leads.

Here's the time budget for one brand with 3 to 5 networks: 20 minutes for the inventory, 15 for profiles, 45 for performance data and benchmarks, 20 for content mix and timing, 20 for competitors, 15 for the inbox, and 25 for decisions and the summary. That's about 2 hours 40 minutes.

How to do a social media audit in 10 steps

Step 1: Inventory every account, including the forgotten ones

Forgotten accounts are the most common audit finding: an old Facebook Page from a previous owner, a Twitter account an intern opened in 2019, a duplicate Google Business Profile. They confuse customers and sometimes outrank the real account in search.

1. Write down every account you know about: network, handle, URL, who has the login, and the email it's registered to.
2. Search the brand name and common misspellings inside each network's search bar (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Threads).
3. Search Google for "brand name" site:facebook.com, then repeat with instagram.com, tiktok.com, x.com and linkedin.com.
4. Search the company inbox for "Welcome to", "Confirm your account" and "verify your email". Signup emails reveal accounts nobody remembers.
5. In Meta Business Suite, open Settings, then Business assets, and list every Page and Instagram account connected to the business.
6. Check the website footer, email signature and Google Business Profile for social links. Old links often point to dead accounts.
7. Ask past staff or the previous agency which accounts they created.

For each account, mark one status: active, merge (duplicate you can combine), archive (keep the handle, post nothing) or delete. Never delete an account with a good handle; archive it with a bio that points to the main account.

Step 2: Check profile consistency

Open each active profile on your phone, the way customers see it, and fill in this checklist.

A bio rewrite is the fastest fix in the whole audit. If you need a starting point, the free AI bio generator writes network-length bios you can edit.

Step 3: Pull 90 days of performance from each network

Use the same 90-day window for every network so you're comparing like with like. Record these numbers per network: followers at the start and end, posts published, total reach or views, total engagements, link clicks, and your top 5 and bottom 5 posts.

Instagram Insights (app):

1. Open your profile and tap Professional dashboard.
2. Tap Account insights, then the date range at the top, and choose the last 90 days.
3. Record Accounts reached, Accounts engaged and follower change.
4. Tap Content you shared to sort posts and Reels by reach, and note the top and bottom 5.

Meta Business Suite (Facebook and Instagram on desktop):

1. Go to business.facebook.com and pick the business.
2. Open Insights in the left menu.
3. Set the date range to the last 90 days.
4. Use the Content section to sort posts by reach or interactions, and export if you want the raw data.

TikTok Analytics:

1. In the app, open your profile, tap the menu at the top right, and open TikTok Studio or Creator tools (the label depends on your app version), then Analytics. On desktop, open TikTok Studio and select Analytics.
2. Set a custom date range covering 90 days.
3. Record video views, profile views, likes, comments and shares from the overview.
4. Open the content view to list your top and bottom 5 videos, and note average watch time for each.

LinkedIn Page analytics:

1. Open your Page in admin view and select Analytics.
2. Check the sections LinkedIn lists in its Page analytics help article: Content, Followers, Visitors, Search appearances and Competitors.
3. In Content, set the range to 90 days and record impressions, clicks, reactions and engagement rate.
4. In Followers, note job function, seniority and industry of new followers. For B2B, this matters more than the follower count.

YouTube Studio:

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio and click Analytics in the left menu, as described in YouTube's analytics guide.
2. Set the range to the last 90 days in the top right.
3. On Overview, record views, watch time and subscriber change.
4. On Content, split long videos from Shorts and note the top 5 of each. On Audience, note when your viewers are on YouTube.

X analytics:

1. On x.com, open the menu and look for Analytics. If it's missing, account-level analytics likely require X Premium; record the view count on your 20 most recent posts instead.
2. Record impressions, engagements, link clicks and follower change for 90 days.

Step 4: Benchmark against industry numbers

Raw numbers mean little without context. Calculate engagement rate per post by followers, since that's how the public benchmark reports calculate it:

Engagement rate per post = (engagements on the post / followers) x 100. Average it across all posts in the 90 days.

Then compare with published benchmarks. Socialinsider's 2026 benchmarks, based on data from January 2024 to December 2025, give these 2025 averages:

For industry-specific medians, use the Rival IQ 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, which samples 150 companies per industry and reports the median. It shows big swings by industry: Higher Education more than quadrupled the median on Instagram and TikTok, while Health and Beauty had the lowest engagement across platforms. Neither report covers LinkedIn, so compare LinkedIn against your own last quarter and against competitors using LinkedIn's Competitors tab.

Mark each network above, near (within 25% of the benchmark) or below. Below-benchmark engagement on a network with high posting effort is your first candidate for "fix" or "stop".

Step 5: Audit your content mix by pillar and format

List the last 90 days of posts per network and tag each one with two labels:

• Pillar: the topic group. A gym might use Transformations, Coaching tips, Community and events, Offers.
• Format: Reel or short video, carousel, single image, text, link post, Story, live.

Then count posts and average engagement rate per pillar and per format. You're looking for mismatches: a pillar that gets 40% of the posts and 10% of the engagement, or a format that consistently beats the rest.

Check the basics too: are captions readable on mobile, do images have text that fits the crop, and do hashtags stay within limits (Instagram now caps posts at 5 hashtags). Paste 3 recent posts into the free post preview tool to see how they look in the feed before you judge them.

Step 6: Audit posting times and cadence

Note two things per network: how many times you posted per week, and whether the schedule was steady or bursty (10 posts one week, 0 the next).

1. From Step 3, list the days and hours of your top 10 posts.
2. Compare them with when your followers are online. Instagram shows this in Account insights under your total followers, YouTube in the Audience tab, and TikTok in the followers view of Analytics.
3. Compare your cadence with the benchmark posting frequency above and with competitors.

For most small businesses, a steady 3 to 4 posts a week on the main network beats 7 rushed ones. If your best posts cluster at specific hours, move your schedule there. Our guide to the best times to post on social media covers per-network starting points.

Step 7: Check audience fit

Pull age, top cities and (on LinkedIn) job functions from each network's audience tab, then ask:

• Does the top city match where the business operates? A local gym with 40% of followers in another country bought followers or ran a giveaway that attracted the wrong people.
• Does the age range match your buyers?
• Are followers growing from the right sources (profile visits, shares) rather than from contests?

If it doesn't match, stop broad giveaways and post about things only real customers care about: local events, specific services, customer stories.

Step 8: Run a social media competitor audit

Pick 3 competitors: one direct local rival, one bigger brand in your niche, and one account you admire. For each, spend 5 minutes on their profile and record the same fields.

Calculate their engagement from the last 10 posts (likes plus comments, divided by followers). Don't copy their posts. Look for the topics and formats that work across all three, and for gaps none of them cover.

Step 9: Audit the inbox and response time

Most audits skip this step, and it's often where the money is. A DM asking "how much is membership?" that sits for 3 days is a lost sale.

1. Open the inbox on each network (or your unified inbox) and scroll back 30 days.
2. Pick 20 messages and comments that asked a question.
3. For each, record the time to first reply and whether the question got answered.
4. Count unanswered questions and calculate the median reply time.
5. Check for saved replies for common questions (price, hours, booking, location).

Set targets you can hold: reply to DMs within 4 business hours, comments within 24 hours, and answer every price or booking question the same day.

Step 10: Decide what to keep, fix and stop

Every finding becomes one of three decisions. Limit yourself to 3 to 5 of each, or the plan won't happen.

Social media audit template (copy it)

Copy this template into a doc or spreadsheet. Each section matches a step above, and the first row is a filled example for Northside Strength, the gym from Step 5. Replace it with your own data.

1. Account inventory

2. Profile checklist

3. Performance (last 90 days)

4. Content mix

5. Timing, cadence and audience

6. Competitors

7. Inbox

8. Decisions

This is also a working social media audit checklist: if every table has at least one row per active network, the audit is complete.

Social media audit example: a small gym

Here's how the summary line reads for the example gym, the kind of sentence that goes at the top of the report:

And the findings behind it, in plain terms:

• Found 2 forgotten accounts: a 2019 X account (archived, bio now points to Instagram) and a duplicate Facebook Page from the previous owner (merge requested).
• TikTok gets views but no trial bookings, because the link isn't in the bio.
• Offers are 38% of Instagram posts and the weakest pillar.
• The best-performing hour is 6 am on weekdays, when members head to class. The schedule was random.

The same structure works for a real estate agent: replace pillars with Listings, Neighborhood guides, Market updates and Client stories, and replace trial bookings with valuation requests.

How to write the social media audit report

Your client will read one page. Put everything else in an appendix.

Page 1: the summary (the only page most people read)

1. One-line verdict: the best channel, the weakest channel and the biggest fix.
2. Three wins with numbers.
3. Three problems with numbers.
4. The keep, fix and stop table.
5. What happens in the next 30 days, with owners.

Appendix

• The full template tables from above.
• Screenshots of each analytics screen.
• Top and bottom 5 posts per network, with a one-line reason for each.
• Competitor notes.

Write the summary in the client's language: "bookings" and "calls", not "engagement velocity".

30-day fix plan

Turn the decisions into a four-week plan. Keep it small enough to finish.

Week 1: Clean up. Fix bios, links, photos and pinned posts on every active account. Archive or merge the forgotten accounts. Move every login to a shared company email. Write saved replies for the 5 most common questions.

Week 2: Reset the schedule. Set a fixed cadence per network (for example, Instagram 4 a week, TikTok 3, Facebook 3) at the hours from Step 6. Build 2 weeks of posts in the new pillar mix. If Instagram is your main channel, an Instagram scheduler keeps the cadence steady while you work on everything else.

Week 3: Test. Run 2 tests from the competitor audit, such as coach Q&A Reels, or turning a transformation story into a carousel and a short video. Change one thing at a time.

Week 4: Measure. Compare the 4 weeks with the same metrics from Step 3. Keep what moved, drop what didn't, and book the next quarterly audit.

B2B social media audit: what changes

A B2B social media audit uses the same 10 steps, with four differences:

• Include people, not just the Page. Founders and sales staff often drive more reach than the company Page on LinkedIn. Audit their profiles (headline, banner, featured section) the same way you audit the brand.
• Measure lead quality, not reach. Track demo requests, inbound DMs from target accounts, and website visits from social that reach a pricing or contact page.
• Audit audience by job function and seniority. LinkedIn's Followers and Visitors sections show whether you're reaching buyers or other marketers.
• Add document carousels and long posts to the format list. On LinkedIn, PDF carousels and text posts often behave differently from images, so tag them separately in Step 5.

How an AI planner uses audit findings

An audit only matters if it changes what gets posted next week. An AI planner helps because the findings become rules instead of intentions. In SocialScheduler, the AI plans each client's week every Sunday, writes posts in the client's voice, and publishes at the hours that client's audience is online. You can hand it what the audit found: the pillars that work, the formats to favor (carousels on Instagram and Threads, PDF document carousels on LinkedIn, short vertical videos), the cadence per network, and the topics to stop. It then learns from each post's results, so the next plan leans toward what performed.

The inbox findings carry over too. SocialScheduler's inbox covers comments and DMs for Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, YouTube and Bluesky, with keyword rules that auto-reply to common questions like price and booking. It doesn't cover TikTok or LinkedIn messages, so audit those manually.

Social media audit tools

You can do the whole audit with free tools: each network's native analytics (the most accurate source for your own accounts), a spreadsheet with the template above, website analytics for UTM-tagged clicks, and the free yearly benchmark reports from Socialinsider and Rival IQ. A paid social media audit tool pays off when you audit 5 or more brands a quarter, mainly because it saves Step 3: pulling data from every network into one place.

Common social media audit mistakes

• Mixing date ranges. 30 days of TikTok against 90 days of Instagram makes every conclusion wrong.
• Judging by followers. A 2,000-follower account with 50 bookings beats a 20,000-follower account with none.
• Too many actions. A plan with 25 fixes gets none done.
• Skipping the inbox. Slow replies cost sales that never show up in engagement data.
• Copying competitors. Take the pattern, not the post.

Start with Step 1 today: list every account and fix the logins, which takes 20 minutes and protects everything else. Then block 2 hours this week for Steps 2 to 10, fill in the template, and send the one-page summary. Book the next audit for 90 days from now.