Statista showed that social media users will exceed 5.17 billion in 2025. This is about half of the entire human population on Earth.
Social media audits have become crucial for businesses in 2025. With over 4.55 billion global social media users, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok continue to evolve rapidly. Regular social media audits allow companies to keep up with changes and maintain a competitive edge.
Recent industry reports show that 47% of consumers expect brands to provide customer service through social media. Meanwhile, 71% of social media users say companies should interact with followers and respond to comments and messages. Failing to engage audiences and monitor social presence can harm the brand’s reputation and cause a loss of customers.
This is why performing comprehensive social media audits is key. Audits evaluate all aspects of a company’s social media strategy and uncover areas for improvement. Following a step-by-step audit process ensures you gather valuable insights that inform impactful changes.
In 2025, social media users are as follows:
Facebook Active Users – 3.07 billion
X/Twitter Active Users – 556 million
YouTube Active Users – 2.70 billion
WhatsApp Active Users – 2.78 billion
Instagram Active Users – 2.35 billion
TikTok Active Users – 1.58 billion
LinkedIn Active Users – 1.03 billion
On average, the typical social media user uses 7.2 social media platforms. Eastern Asian users are the largest social media consumers, representing 28% of the global population. That said, social media is used by more than 92% of the world’s 5.72 billion smartphone users.
What is a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit is a comprehensive assessment of your social media presence. It involves reviewing your profiles, content, engagement, and overall strategy. The audit aims to identify areas for improvement and develop a plan for optimising your social media performance.
Social Media in Numbers
Despite gloom and doom, Facebook is still the most used platform by marketers, and Instagram comes in second.
Social media has a powerful influence on Internetusers, who increasingly use mobile devices. Over 4.9 billion social media users, or 95%, access their accounts using a mobile device.
Organisations need to conduct social media audits regularly to understand how effective their social media presence is.
Conducting a Complete Social Media Audit
Set goals. Clarify what you aim to learn from the audit to guide the process. Common goals include benchmarking engagement rates, identifying brand mentions and influencer opportunities, evaluating performance by platform and more.
Gather data. Use social media management tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Rival IQ to pull key metrics across platforms, such as tracking followers, interactions, engagement, clicks, mentions, sentiment, and follower demographics.
Analyse competitors. See how competitor social media accounts compare to yours. Examine their content strategy, aesthetics, messaging and engagement levels. This reveals their tactics and where you can improve.
Evaluate your posting strategy. Audit your social content’s frequency, timing, variety, and quality across platforms. Identify what types of posts, formats, and topics resonate best with your audience.
Assess engagement. Look at follower interactions with your content and brand. Check response rates, click-throughs, likes, shares, comments, etc. This will show you what content and tactics encourage engagement.
Check branding consistency. Review profile info, imagery, messaging and tone of voice across platforms. Ensure your branding is cohesive.
Monitor mentions and sentiment. Use social listening tools to find brand mentions and see how users perceive your brand online. This reveals pain points that need to be addressed, as well as outreach opportunities.
Create an improvement plan. Based on audit findings, set SMART goals and assign tasks across your team to update strategies and tactics.
Analysing Audit Findings and Creating an Action Plan
Properly analysing the data and turning insights into strategic next steps is key to making your social media audit effective.
Start by identifying major takeaways, strengths and weaknesses across platforms. Look for patterns and themes. Compare metrics to industry benchmarks.
For example, your Facebook engagement rate may be 2% lower than your competitors. X/Twitter follower growth might have stagnated versus rapid Instagram growth. TikTok videos outperform static image posts across the board.
Pinpoint areas needing improvement include inconsistent branding, low organic reach, and poor click-through rates. Find gaps where competitors are outperforming you.
Determine why these issues exist. Is the poor click-through rate due to ineffective calls to action? Are followers disengaged because the content lacks relevance? Does inconsistent branding cause brand confusion?
Next, turn-key findings into S.M.A.R.T. social media goals and tactical plans:
Specific – Target fixing identified weaknesses.
Measurable – Metrics to benchmark progress
Achievable – With proper tools and resources
Relevant – Align goals to business objectives
Time-bound – Set deadlines for implementation
Prioritise goals based on potential business impact. Assign tasks and resources to execute. Set follow-up audit dates to track progress. Frequent audits ensure your strategy evolves along with social platforms.
Benefits of Conducting Social Media Audits
Optimise engagement levels and reach broader audiences.
Uncover new marketing opportunities and partnerships.
Adapt branding, content and activities to current trends.
Identify influencers and evangelists to leverage.
Resolve customer pain points and improve satisfaction.
Keep up with competitors and industry benchmarks.
Inform strategic decisions with data-based insights.
Improve efficiency by reallocating resources properly.
Social Media Audits: Tracking Your Profile’s Performance
Conducting a social media audit monthly is best. The audit may be as simple as using a spreadsheet to gather and track historical information as it changes over time.
The basic information tracked includes
Profile information, which needs to be current
Frequency of postings made to the social media account
Tracking the changes from month to month is essential, and comparing them with the same time last year.
Advanced Analysis Techniques
Basic metrics tell only part of the story. Advanced social media audit techniques reveal deeper insights that drive strategic business decisions and competitive advantage. These sophisticated analysis methods help businesses understand not just what happened, but why it happened and how to replicate success across all digital channels.
Content Performance Deep Dive
Moving beyond basic engagement metrics requires sophisticated analysis of content effectiveness across different dimensions.
Video Content Performance Analysis: Video content consistently outperforms static images across most platforms, with short-form videos generating 2.5 times higher engagement rates than longer formats. Professional video production that aligns with proven social media preferences can significantly amplify brand reach and engagement. However, in-depth educational content and behind-the-scenes material build stronger community connections, suggesting opportunities for diverse video production strategies.
Website Traffic and Conversion Optimisation: Analysis should reveal how social media drives website visits and which social touchpoints contribute most effectively to conversions. This intelligence directly informs web design priorities, user experience improvements, and conversion rate optimisation strategies.
AI-Powered Content Personalisation: Advanced auditing reveals audience segments with distinct content preferences, creating AI-driven personalisation opportunities that improve engagement rates and reduce content creation workload through intelligent automation.
SEO Signal Strengthening: Social media audit data shows which content generates shares, backlinks, and brand mentions—all crucial ranking factors. This insight guides social media strategy and SEO optimisation efforts for improved search visibility.
Audience Behaviour Analysis
Understanding your audience extends beyond demographics to encompass behavioural patterns, preferences, and user journey mapping.
Engagement Patterns: Identify which types of content encourage different engagement types—likes versus comments versus shares—and understand the business value of each interaction type.
Customer Journey Mapping: Track how social media interactions connect to website visits, email subscriptions, and eventual conversions, identifying the most valuable touchpoints in your marketing funnel.
Community Building Assessment: Evaluate the quality of community interactions, identifying brand advocates, influential community members, and opportunities for user-generated content initiatives.
ROI and Business Impact Measurement
Connecting social media performance to concrete business outcomes requires sophisticated attribution analysis and value measurement.
Revenue Attribution: Track social media’s contribution to lead generation, sales conversions, and customer lifetime value using multi-touch attribution models that account for the complex customer journey.
Brand Awareness Impact: Measure share of voice, brand mention sentiment, and brand recall improvements attributable to social media activities.
Customer Service Efficiency: Evaluate social media’s role in customer support, measuring response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction improvements.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Compare social media investment (time, advertising spend, content creation costs) against business results to optimise resource allocation.
Goals of a Social Media Audit
A social media audit comes from understanding an organisation’s goals for using social media. Performance benchmarks are set, and then the social media audit compares the actual results based on quantifiable parameters with the benchmarks of the goals.
Strategic Use of Social Media
Examples of measurable performance benchmarks derived from the organisation’s objectives include measuring brand awareness, determining customer loyalty by tracking repeat business, monitoring web traffic, comparing sales from period to period, retaining customers, and addressing customer support demand.
Return on Investment
A social media audit calculates the return on investment (ROI) compared to the benchmark performance results. For example, suppose the organisation aims to obtain new customers. In that case, the number of new customers and their long-term value to the company are compared with the cost of customer acquisition through social media channels.
When the benchmarks are conversions or sales, calculating the ROI for social media campaigns is easier.
Sometimes the return on investment is hard to reduce to a dollar amount or a percentage. Instead, it may be a calculation of brand awareness achieved by counting social media interactions. This calculation compares an organisation’s contribution to social media with the number of social contributions this contribution causes to occur from others.
Optimise Smart explains an example like this.
Here are some possible social contributions made by an organisation:
Suppose a company shares a post using any of the above methods. In that case, the tracking of the replies shows whether the return of social contributions by others is greater or less than the organisational efforts. Ideally, the replies should be at least twice the organisation’s social contributions. It is even better if the replies come from a treasured demographic or geographical location that is part of the organisation’s target audience. A high amplification rate, where the social media responses vastly exceed the organisation’s social media contributions, causes certain content to go “viral.”
Whether or not the social media audit results in an actual dollar cost versus dollar return comparison or a comparison of the ratio of social responses to social contributions, there should be a clear metric tracked by the audit to see if the social media efforts produce positive results.
Moreover, it is essential to compare the effectiveness of different social media channels and focus social media efforts on the channels producing the best results.
The True Social Metrics Tool, which offers a free 30-day trial, is a helpful tool for calculating the amplification rate of social media contributions.
Amplification increases when an organisation becomes influential in a specific niche and positively impacts others with influence. One thing to track with the social media audit is the contributions that produce the most excellent amplification. When an organisation sees how a particular social media contribution creates amplification, it can create similar content in the future to increase positive results.
If an organisation has a global reach, it is essential to release new content on social media when there is more activity. In the local time zone, this is usually in the evenings and on weekends. For global participants, posting social contributions on regional social media sites in the local language is a terrific idea.
Evaluation of the Social Media Strategy
As noted by Optimise Smart, the social media audit uncovers weaknesses in the overall social media strategy by analysing the following factors:
Clear identification of the target audience
Achievement of quantifiable goals
Preparation of unique, quality content used for social media campaigns
Alignment of social media content with the organisation’s overall marketing plans
Frequency and consistency of publishing on social media channels
The advertising budget for social media channels to support “organic” promotional efforts
Target Audience
One problem with the widespread use of social media is that exposure through social media channels does not target the most beneficial users for an organisation’s promotional efforts. The target audience needs to be very clearly defined, including age, gender, location, profession, income, lifestyle, purchasing power, buying patterns, and so forth. It is essential to learn where most of the target audience spends their time participating in online activities.
Because social media is a wide net that may capture all kinds of users, the social media audit needs to focus on how best to capture the target audience’s attention rather than large numbers of random people.
An example of a valuable tool in conducting a social media audit is the Facebook feature, which shows the demographics and geographical location of users who like a specific page. If a company’s marketing efforts are concentrated towards a particular age group or demographic from a specific part of the world, getting many likes from others who do not meet these qualifications is not very helpful.
Capturing lots of attention from the wrong kind of Facebook users indicates that the messaging strategy needs a serious adjustment. This is a good example of why regularly conducting a social media audit helps uncover where social media efforts are ineffective. X/Twitter has similar demographic and geographical information tools helpful in social media audit analysis.
How ProfileTree Transforms Social Media Audits into Business Growth
ProfileTree goes beyond standard analytics to deliver actionable strategies across all digital channels:
Web Design Integration: We analyse user behaviour patterns from your social media audit to optimise website user experience, improve conversion paths, and create seamless transitions from social platforms to your website.
Professional Video Production: We use audit insights about your audience’s preferences to develop targeted video strategies that align with proven social media performance data.
Strategic Content Creation: Our content marketing builds on audit findings to create material that resonates with your specific audience segments and drives engagement.
AI Implementation: We identify automation opportunities and train your team on AI tools that improve social media efficiency and personalisation.
SEO Optimisation: Social media audits reveal SEO opportunities through brand mentions, content sharing patterns, and local engagement data that improve search rankings.
Digital Training: We provide hands-on training to help your team implement audit recommendations effectively and build long-term capabilities.
Content Creation and Community Management
Audit insights should directly inform content creation strategies and community engagement approaches.
Editorial Calendar Development: Create content schedules that reflect optimal posting times, content mix ratios, and seasonal opportunities identified during the audit process.
Community Engagement Protocols: Develop response strategies for different community interactions, ensuring consistent brand voice and appropriate response times.
User-Generated Content Programs: Implement systems to encourage, curate, and showcase customer-created content that builds community and provides authentic social proof.
Influencer Partnership Strategy: Identify and develop relationships with relevant influencers and industry partners who can expand reach and credibility within your target market.
Conclusion
Performing regular social media audits is crucial for brands today. A comprehensive audit process allows you to evaluate all aspects of your social media strategy, from content to engagement. Dedicate time to properly analysing audit data, pinpointing strategic gaps and opportunities, and turning findings into an actionable improvement plan. Implement changes and conduct follow-up audits to ensure your social presence adapts and excels. With clear audit insights and effective execution, your brand can continually optimise social media impact and performance.
The powerful global influence of social media is too significant a trend to ignore. Organisations are encouraged to conduct regular social media audits to determine if the goals and objectives of their social media strategy are appropriate and to calculate a return on investment.
By regularly conducting a social media audit, organisations can focus on the most productive social media activity and more closely align their efforts with the goals of influencing an identified target audience. This strategic monitoring of social media efforts helps an organisation stay on track and avoid making wasteful attempts to contact users outside the target audience.
Ready to Transform Your Social Media Insights into Business Growth?
Your social media audit data holds untapped potential for driving real business results. While most businesses collect the data and file it away, ProfileTree transforms those insights into comprehensive digital strategies that generate measurable ROI.
Whether you need a professional social media audit conducted from scratch or you have existing data that requires expert interpretation and strategic implementation, our team is ready to help. We don’t just analyse your social media performance—we show you how to leverage those insights across your website, video content, AI automation, SEO strategy, and team training initiatives.
Get started with ProfileTree today:
Free Social Media Audit Consultation: Discover what your current social media data reveals about untapped growth opportunities
Comprehensive Digital Strategy Review: See how social media insights can improve your website performance and content marketing
AI and Digital Training Assessment: Learn how automation can streamline your social media management while improving results
Don’t let valuable social media insights sit unused while your competitors gain ground. Contact ProfileTree today to discuss how our integrated approach to social media auditing and digital strategy can accelerate your business growth.
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