30 January 2023 |

Here’s the Exact Social Media Audit I use When Onboarding a New Account

By

I briefly mentioned my social media audit in a past edition of Social Files a few weeks ago, and my inbox was flooded with people asking for the template.

No, this isn’t like the time your favorite girlboss influencer starts off a, IG Story with the classic “A lot of you have been asking me…”

For real. A lot of you have been asking me. So here it is.

And one more disclaimer before I lay it all on the line.

This audit isn’t perfect. I’m sure there are holes in it. I’m sure other social media professionals have different audit styles. Maybe you do.

So this isn’t the definitive guide. It just works for me.

If you’re just starting out, this will give you a solid foundation. If you’ve got some years under your belt, this should offer a unique perspective, with ideas to steal for your own workflow.

Ok. Here’s the audit. It’s literally a checklist of questions to ask yourself. No fancy copywriting in this edition.

Part I: The brand

  1. What products and services does your brand offer?
  2. What are your brand’s values? How do you want to be perceived on social media?
  3. What does your brand want the customer to know?
  4. Who is your customer avatar? What type of people are we trying to attract with our content?
  5. What problem(s) do your customers have?
  6. What do most of these customers say about this problem? (This is great for getting a sense of the language your target audience uses)
  7. What do most of these customers say about your product?
  8. How do your customers like to be spoken to? (ie. humor, education, etc)

(A lot of these questions were inspired by content from the Copy MBA course by my boy, Mason)

TLDR here is to get as familiar with the brand, the product, the target customer as you can. Immerse yourself in the brand. The learning curve here is harder than any account audit you’ll do.

Use these questions, and any other questions you can think of, to learn as much as you can in this phase.

Part II: The industry

  1. Who are your top 3-5 competitors?
  2. What angle are they taking on their social accounts? How can your brand stand out from them?
  3. What brands in your industry (doesn’t have to be direct competitors) are doing well on social? What is it that they do well? Any type of content that performs consistently for them?
  4. What are brands and content creators outside of your industry that you admire? *************************This is the secret sauce. I wrote more about it here.

Your priority while studying the landscape of your industry, and looking to brands outside of your industry, is to spot an opportunity stand out.

This could be through tone of voice. This could be through content formats. This could be through platform selection. Find a variable that you can excel at — and work it into the social strategy.

The goal is to take what everyone else is doing, and well… not do that.

Part III: The accounts

  1. What existing content lives in your brand’s ecosystem. This can be blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, previous social media content, etc.
  2. What existing social channels is your brand active on? List these out.
  3. Are there any social accounts where your target audience is active that your brand is not using yet?
  4. What brand voice is currently being used on active brand social accounts? Is there a cohesive and defined voice in place?
  5. What type of content (topics, formats, etc) is performing best? Do this for each individual platform
  6. What type of content is being published consistently, but underperforms? For B2B brands, this is usually webinar promos 💀
  7. What are opportunities for improvement that stand out to you while consuming this content? Try to identify 3-5 piece of low-hanging fruit

And this leads us into the final section…

Part IV: The goals

Now that you have all this information, you need to set ~3 tangible ‘wins’ to work towards.

Look. I don’t really give a shit about OKRs or KPIs. Call these whatever you want. All that matters IMO is that you have 1-3 major goals to work towards in a defined timeframe.

If you spread yourself super thin across 5+ goals — your social presence is gonna suck and you’re going to hate your job.

So don’t do that. Keep it simple. And ignore everything that doesn’t drive your brand towards these goals on social media.

Here are my current social media goals for Social Files, so you have an idea of how I think about this:

Grow my Twitter account from 10K → 100K engaged followers by December 31, 2023.

Grow my LinkedIn account from 10K → 100K engaged followers by December 31, 2023.

Funnel traffic generated from those platforms to my newsletter.

That is literally it. It does not need to be more complex. I’m convinced people make social media strategy more complex than it needs to be to make it feel like they are doing more work than they are.

Define goals. Make good content that supports those goals.

Ok that’s it.

Let me know if you have any pieces of your audit process that I didn’t mention!