How to Do a Social Media Audit (Template and Scorecard)
How to do a social media audit in 7 steps: list every account, score profiles and posts, check what drives leads, and decide which channels to keep, fix or cut.
By the Zenstack team · · 8 min read
To do a social media audit, list every account your business owns, check each profile is complete and on-brand, pull 90 days of results, find the posts and channels that actually drive conversations or sales, and then decide for each channel whether to keep it, fix it or cut it. The whole job fits in an afternoon with a simple scorecard, and it tells you where to spend next quarter's time.
Most templates online stop at a spreadsheet of follower counts. This guide goes one step further and ends with decisions: which channels deserve more effort, which need fixing and which to drop.
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is a structured review of all your social accounts at one point in time. It answers four questions:
- What do we have? Every account, who owns the login and whether it is still active.
- Does it look right? Profiles, bios, links and branding.
- What is working? The posts, formats and channels that reach the right people.
- Is it worth the time? Whether each channel produces leads, sales or conversations that justify the hours spent on it.
The first two are housekeeping. The last two are where the value is, and they are the parts most teams skip.
What to include in a social media audit
Before you start, decide what you will measure. Keep it to a short list you can fill in for every channel:
| Area | What to check | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Account inventory | Handle, URL, owner of the login, last post date | Stops lost logins and forgotten pages hurting your brand |
| Profile | Name, photo, bio, link, contact details, pinned post | It is the first thing a prospect sees after your post |
| Audience | Followers, growth over 90 days, who they are | Tells you whether you are reaching buyers or random accounts |
| Content | Posts per week, formats, topics, top and bottom posts | Shows what to make more of and what to stop |
| Engagement | Reactions, comments, shares, saves, replies to DMs | Shows whether people care, and how fast you answer |
| Business results | Site visits, leads, booked calls or sales from each channel | Decides whether the channel deserves your time |
| Competitors | Two or three rivals' posting rhythm and best posts | Gives you a benchmark and content ideas |
How to do a social media audit in 7 steps
1. List every account you own
Search each platform for your brand name, old brand names and founder names. Add every account to a sheet, including inactive ones, regional pages and anything an old agency or employee set up. Note who has admin access and where the login is stored.
You will often find a dormant page from years ago, or one that someone outside the business created. Either claim it and redirect people to your active account, or report it to the platform if it impersonates you.
2. Write down each channel's job
Give each account one goal before you look at a single number. For example, LinkedIn's job might be "start conversations with buyers", Instagram's might be "show the product in use", and Facebook's might be "answer existing customers". Without a goal, every metric looks either fine or bad depending on your mood.
3. Check every profile
Open each profile on your phone, as a stranger would. Check that:
- The name, photo and cover image match your current brand
- The bio says what you do and who for in one line
- The link goes to a live page, ideally one built for that channel's visitors
- Contact options, location and category are filled in
- The pinned or featured post is recent and still relevant
This step takes minutes and fixes the most obvious problems first.
4. Pull 90 days of results
Export the last 90 days from each platform's built-in analytics. LinkedIn, for example, gives every Page admin access to Page analytics covering visitors, followers and content. Ninety days is long enough to smooth out a lucky week and short enough to reflect your current approach.
For each channel, record posts per week, follower growth, average engagement per post and how quickly you replied to comments and messages.
5. Find your top and bottom posts
Sort the posts by the metric that matches the channel's job. For a channel meant to start conversations, sort by comments and DMs, not likes. Take the top ten and bottom ten and look for patterns: topic, format, length, hook, who appeared in the post, day of the week.
Write each pattern as one sentence, such as "Client results in carousel form get far more comments than tips posts." Those sentences become next quarter's content plan. Our guide to building a social media content calendar shows how to turn them into content pillars and fixed weekly slots.
6. Connect each channel to business results
This is the step that separates a useful audit from a vanity report. For each channel, find out:
- How many visits it sent to your website. Tag the links in your bios and posts with UTM parameters so they show up properly in Google Analytics campaign reports.
- How many leads, booked calls or sales came from it. Ask "how did you hear about us?" on your form and on the first call, and log the answer in your CRM.
- How many real conversations started in comments or DMs with people who fit your ideal customer profile.
If a channel cannot be connected to any of these after 90 days of steady posting, that is a finding in itself.
7. Decide: keep, fix or cut
End the audit with one decision per channel and no more than five actions in total. Each action gets an owner and a date.
- Keep: The channel does its job. Do more of what the top posts have in common.
- Fix: The audience is right but results are weak. Change one thing, such as format, posting rhythm or profile link, and recheck in 90 days.
- Cut: The audience is wrong or results are absent after a fair try. Post a pinned note pointing to your active channels and stop spending time there.
Cutting a channel feels uncomfortable, but two well-run channels almost always beat five neglected ones.
Social media audit template (scorecard)
Copy this into a sheet with one row per channel. Score each area from 1 (poor) to 3 (good), then add the decision.
| Channel | Job | Profile (1–3) | Consistency (1–3) | Engagement (1–3) | Results (1–3) | Total /12 | Decision | Top action | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer conversations | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 11 | Keep | Post client results weekly | Social manager | |
| Product proof | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 7 | Fix | Add tagged link in bio, test reels | Social manager | |
| X | Industry news | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | Cut | Pin note to LinkedIn, stop posting | Founder |
How to read the score:
- 10 to 12: Keep and invest more time.
- 6 to 9: Fix one thing and recheck next quarter.
- 5 or less: Cut, unless the channel is new and has had under 90 days of steady posting.
The "Results" column should carry the most weight in your head. A channel can score well on engagement and still produce no buyers.
A short audit example
Say a small B2B consultancy posts on LinkedIn, Instagram and X. The audit shows LinkedIn produced most of their inbound calls, mostly from posts about client results written by the founder. Instagram has a broken bio link and gets likes from other consultants, not buyers. X has not been updated in eight months.
The decisions: keep LinkedIn and add a weekly client-result post, following the steps in our guide on how to grow a LinkedIn company page. Fix Instagram's link and test it as a place to repurpose LinkedIn posts for 90 days. Cut X with a pinned post pointing to LinkedIn. Three channels, three decisions, five actions, done in one afternoon.
Social media audit checklist
Use this quick list if you only have an hour:
- Every account listed, with login owner and last post date
- Old or unofficial accounts claimed, merged or reported
- Each channel has one written job
- Bios, photos and links current and working on mobile
- UTM tags on every bio and post link
- 90 days of results exported per channel
- Top ten and bottom ten posts reviewed, patterns written down
- Leads and sales per channel pulled from your CRM or form answers
- Two or three competitors checked
- Keep, fix or cut decision per channel, with owners and dates
How often should you do a social media audit?
For most small businesses, a full audit once a quarter is enough. It lines up with how long you need to give a change before judging it. Run a lighter check monthly, looking only at the results column, and an extra full audit after a rebrand, a new offer, a change of the person running your accounts, or a big change in how a platform shows posts.
If you run paid social too, review your organic winners at the same time. Strong organic posts are often good ad candidates, so share the audit's top posts with whoever runs your ads.
Who should run your social media audit?
The audit itself is a strategy task: setting each channel's job, reading the numbers and making the keep, fix or cut call. The actions that follow are daily execution: fixing profiles, posting on rhythm and replying to comments. Our comparison of social media manager vs strategist explains how the two roles split this work and which one most small teams hire first.
Getting a dedicated remote hire to run the audit and the fixes
Most audits fail after the meeting: the findings are clear, but nobody has the hours to act on them. Through Zenstack, a full-time remote social media strategist works only for your brand, in your hours, running the quarterly audit and turning it into a plan. A dedicated social media manager can then fix the profiles, keep the posting rhythm and answer every comment and message.
Rates start at $12 an hour, about $1,920 a month for a full-time hire, with recruiting, contracts and payroll handled by us. See our pricing, or tell us which channels you run and we will suggest which role to start with.
Frequently asked questions
What is the purpose of a social media audit?
It shows which of your social accounts are worth the time you put into them. You come out with a clear list of channels to keep, fix or drop, and the specific changes that will improve the ones you keep.
How long does a social media audit take?
For a small business with two to four channels, a few hours with a template is usually enough. The slowest part is connecting each channel to leads and sales if your links and CRM are not tagged yet.
What metrics should I look at in a social media audit?
Posting consistency, follower growth, engagement per post, response time to comments and messages, website visits from each channel, and the leads or sales each one produces. Weight the business results above follower count.
Should I delete inactive social media accounts?
Not always. Claim the handle, update the profile and pin a post that points people to your active channels, so nobody else can use the name and visitors still find you.
Can I do a social media audit without paid tools?
Yes. Every major platform has built-in analytics you can export, and a spreadsheet is enough for the scorecard. Paid tools mainly save time when you manage many accounts or want competitor data in one place.