A social media audit template gives you one place to record every account your brand owns, who can get into it, what it says about you and whether it is earning its keep. Run it once a quarter and you stop guessing which channels matter. This guide gives you the template, the seven steps to fill it in and a checklist to finish with.
Most audits focus on content. The biggest risks usually sit somewhere duller: a former employee who still has admin rights, an old campaign account nobody can log into, or a bio that still links to a page that died two years ago. So our template starts with ownership and access, then moves on to performance.
The short version
- Start with an inventory. List every account, including the dormant ones, before you look at a single metric.
- Check access next. UK government guidance says to keep a register of who has access and update it at least once a month.
- Export your data. Native analytics windows are short, so save at least 90 days of numbers outside the platforms.
- Judge content by what it does, not what it gets. Rank posts by reach, saves, shares and clicks against your goals, then name the formats to keep and kill.
- Finish with owners and dates. An audit is only finished when every finding has someone responsible and a deadline.
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit is a structured review of every social account a brand controls. It checks four things: that you own and can secure each account, that each profile presents the brand correctly, that the content is reaching and moving the right people, and how you compare with competitors. The output is a short list of fixes, not a long report.
It is different from a strategy. Your social media strategy says where you want to go. The audit tells you honestly where you are now, so the strategy starts from facts. It is also different from monthly reporting, which tracks the social media KPIs you have already chosen. An audit questions whether you are tracking the right things at all.
Social media audit template: the 10 areas to record
Here is the template we use as a starting point. Build it in Google Sheets or Excel with one tab per area. The steps below explain how to fill each part in.
| Area | What to record | Where to find it | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Account inventory | Platform, handle, URL, owner, last post date, followers | Search each platform for your brand name and old campaign names | Accounts nobody can log into, or no post in 90 days |
| 2. Access | Every person and agency with access, their role, login method | Platform settings, Meta business portfolio, LinkedIn Page admins, password manager | Leavers still listed, shared passwords, no two step verification |
| 3. Profile | Name, bio, profile image, banner, links, verification status | Each profile, viewed logged out on mobile | Old logo, dead links, different bios on every channel |
| 4. Content | Posts, format, pillar, reach or views, engagement, saves, shares, clicks | Native analytics exports, last 90 days minimum | One format doing all the work, pillars nobody watches |
| 5. Audience | Age, location, follower growth, share of non followers reached | Native analytics audience tabs | Audience no longer matches the customer you sell to |
| 6. Community | Comments and DMs received, replied, median reply time | Inbox tools, a one week manual sample | Unanswered complaints, no out of hours cover |
| 7. Paid and partners | Active ads, creator posts, disclosure labels, usage rights end dates | Ads Manager, contracts, creator posts | Missing Ad labels, creator content used after rights expired |
| 8. Accessibility | Captions on video, alt text on images, readable text on graphics | Spot check 20 recent posts per channel | Videos that only make sense with sound on |
| 9. Competitors | Three to five rivals: cadence, formats, themes, response style | Their public profiles, a benchmark tool if you have one | A rival owns a format or topic you assumed was yours |
| 10. Actions | Finding, fix, owner, deadline, metric to watch | Your audit sheet | Findings with no owner or date |
Advertain guidance. Copy the columns into a spreadsheet with one tab per area, and one row per account or post.
Step 1: Find every account you own
Search each platform for your brand name, product names, old campaign names and common misspellings. Check regional pages, recruitment accounts and anything an agency set up for a launch. Record the handle, URL, follower count, last post date and the person who owns it.
While you search, note any accounts that pretend to be you. Impersonation is common. Among UK organisations that identified a breach or attack, 34% of businesses and 35% of charities said others had impersonated the organisation or its staff in emails or online, according to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025. And in an Ofcom test, 76% of UK social media users correctly identified a fake profile, which means roughly one in four did not (Ofcom Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes 2025). Report fake accounts through each platform, and consider verification where it is available; Meta describes its Meta Verified badge as offering impersonation protection.
Then decide what to do with dormant accounts. Either revive them with a clear purpose, merge them into a main account, or close them. An abandoned account with your logo on it still speaks for you.
Step 2: Check who has access
This is the step most audits skip, and the one that causes the worst days. The UK government’s guidance on using social media securely is direct: turn on two factor authentication for all social media accounts, keep the number of people who can set up accounts and grant access to a minimum, and secure passwords with a password management tool. It also says to create a register of who has access and update it at least once a month.
“Remove access for staff when they leave and change any social media account passwords they had access to immediately.” UK government security guidance, 2024
For each account, list every person and agency with access, their role and how they log in. Remove leavers, replace shared logins with individual access through business tools such as Meta’s business portfolio or LinkedIn Page admin roles, and make sure at least two people inside the business hold the highest level of access. Takeovers do happen: among UK organisations that identified a breach or attack, 7% of businesses and 9% of charities reported takeovers or attempted takeovers of their website, social media or email accounts (DSIT, 2025). Reports to Action Fraud of social media and email hacking rose by more than half in a year.
Reports of social media and email account hacking to Action Fraud
Step 3: Audit every profile and its brand consistency
Open each profile logged out, on a phone, the way a stranger would see it. Check the name, handle, profile image, banner, bio, pinned posts and links. Are they current? Do they match each other? Does every link work and carry UTM tags so you can see the traffic in your analytics?
Add accessibility here. Spot check 20 recent posts on each channel for captions on video and alt text on images. Captions are not a niche need: 79% of UK viewers use subtitles at least some of the time, and 59% of UK 18 to 24s use them always or often, according to research by XR reported by Advanced Television (vendor research, May 2026).
Step 4: Audit content performance
Export your analytics first. Native windows are short; Instagram’s Help Centre, for example, says account insights cover any time period within the past 90 days. Save at least 90 days of post level data from every platform into your sheet before anything rolls off.
Then tag every post with its format (short video, carousel, image, long form, live) and its content pillar, and rank posts by the metric that matches your goal: reach and views for awareness, saves and shares for consideration, clicks and conversions for action. Our guide to social media KPIs explains which metric fits which goal, and how to calculate social media ROI covers the money side.
Look for patterns rather than single hits. Which pillar consistently outperforms? Which format do you keep making out of habit? Measurement is hard for most teams; only 51% of B2B marketers agreed their organisation measures content performance effectively in the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 research. An audit is your chance to fix that.
Finally, check your content against what drives people away. In an NP Digital survey, clickbait headlines and fake or inflated content were the top two reasons people unfollow brands.
Top reasons people unfollow brands on social media (% of followers)
Step 5: Audit your community and response times
Take one recent week and count every comment, mention and direct message, how many you answered, and how long each reply took. Work out your median reply time and your gap outside office hours. Emplifi’s 2025 survey of US consumers found 32% expect a reply to a direct message within one hour (Emplifi, April 2025, vendor research).
Speed matters even more when something goes wrong. In a Sprout Social pulse survey of 2,250 social media users in the US, UK and Australia, 84% said a brand’s response speed directly affects their view of a crisis, and 64% said brands should respond publicly on social rather than through a press release or website statement (Sprout Social, June 2026, vendor research). If your audit shows nobody owns the inbox at weekends, that is a finding.
Check paid and partner activity in the same pass: are creator posts labelled correctly under the ASA influencer guidelines, and are you still using creator content after your usage rights ended?
Step 6: How do you do a social media audit of competitors?
Pick three to five competitors, including at least one you admire rather than one you simply sell against. For each, record posting frequency per channel, main formats, recurring themes or series, how they reply to comments and what their best performing posts have in common.
The aim is not to copy. It is to spot where a rival has claimed a format or topic you assumed was yours, and where there is open space. Write down three gaps you could own.
Step 7: Turn findings into a 90 day action plan
Group every finding into fix now (security and broken links), fix this quarter (profiles, formats, response cover) and test (new formats or channels). Give each one an owner, a deadline and the metric you will check at the next audit. Then feed the content decisions into your social media content calendar.
A worked example
Here is how a first audit might look for a fictional brand, Hollowmere Coffee, a UK roaster with six accounts. The inventory found a forgotten account from a 2023 product launch and a regional page with no posts in 14 months. The access check found a former freelancer still listed as an admin and two accounts sharing one password. Content analysis showed short videos about brewing drove most saves, while product photos drew little response. The community check showed a median reply time of two days and no weekend cover.
The 90 day plan: remove the freelancer and move to individual logins this week, close or merge the two dormant accounts, double down on brewing videos, and set up a weekend rota with a target reply time. The figures in this example are invented to show the method.
Social media audit checklist
| Check | Done when |
|---|---|
| Every account found and listed | The inventory includes dormant and regional accounts, with an owner for each |
| Access register up to date | Only current staff and contracted partners have access, each on their own login |
| Two step verification on | Every admin account uses an authenticator app rather than text codes |
| Profiles consistent | Names, images, bios and links match your current brand on every channel |
| Data exported | At least 90 days of analytics saved outside the platforms |
| Winners and losers named | Top and bottom 10 posts per channel with a reason for each |
| Response time measured | You know your median reply time and your out of hours gap |
| Actions owned | Each finding has an owner, a deadline and a metric to check next quarter |
Advertain guidance.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your channels, see our work or get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
How often should you do a social media audit?
We recommend a full audit once a year and a lighter quarterly review of access, profiles and content performance. Access is the exception: UK government guidance says to update the register of who has access at least once a month, and immediately when someone leaves.
What should a social media audit include?
At minimum: an inventory of every account, who has access, profile details, content performance, audience, community response times, paid and creator activity, accessibility, a competitor comparison and an action plan with owners. The template above covers all ten.
How long does a social media audit take?
For a brand with three to five channels, a first audit usually takes one to two working days, most of it spent exporting and tagging posts. Later audits are quicker because the inventory and access register already exist. This is our experience rather than a published benchmark.
What are the best social media audit tools?
Start with what is free: each platform’s native analytics, its business settings for access, and a spreadsheet. Paid social management and benchmark tools save time on exports and competitor tracking, but they do not replace the access and profile checks, which you have to do by hand.
