Social media is more than entertainment these days.

It is a valuable marketing platform for expanding your business reach, increasing brand awareness, and developing relationships with your audience.

While you may already have a social media marketing strategy in place, you still need a way to determine if it is working.

A simple yet powerful way to do this is by conducting regularly scheduled social media audits.

Don’t let the word audit induce dread or anxiety, however. Once you realize how easy it can be and how it can help, you’ll be enthusiastic to give it a few tries and make it a regular habit for your business marketing strategy.

Learn all about it below!

4. Look for Patterns

With the data you obtain on your best-performing content on each social media platform, begin to look for similarities or patterns.

What do the most popular posts on each platform have in common?

Also, cross-examine the popular posts on all platforms. What do they all have in common?

Things to look for include:

• Post type
• Content type
• Target audience
• Time of posting

Patterns should soon become obvious, showing just how your audience is being reached and how they engage with you.

5. Calculate Your ROI

To be sure you are getting the most from your social media marketing efforts and not wasting time and resources, calculate your ROI.

For example, determine the conversion rate from each social media platform. Track downloads or click-throughs. Analyze how your hashtags are performing.

It may all seem challenging, but with a little practice, you can determine your social media activities ROI with ease and use that information to refine your strategy.

Honestly, everyone’s going to have a slightly different experience here. Some brands will see clear results after a single campaign, while others might need to ride it out for a month or two before anything obvious surfaces. You might find that one quirky post gets shared like wildfire, but the real magic is buried in the steady, quieter engagement trends that build over time. Even a handful of consistently interested followers might matter way more to your actual bottom line than a fleeting viral spike.

If you get stuck, maybe step away from the data for a day. Sometimes too much dashboard staring leads to missing the point—like looking for a specific shell on a huge beach and forgetting to notice the tide. Reach out to your audience or team directly to get a gut check: what do they actually care about, and does your content line up with that? There’s no shame in course-correcting mid-stream if your numbers tell a story you didn’t expect. Social media’s always evolving, and so is your approach.

Here’s the thing: data is only as good as what you do next. It’s easy to get overwhelmed staring at numbers and charts, especially if you’re juggling other business tasks or simply not a fan of spreadsheets. Sometimes just talking things out with a colleague (or, on a particularly caffeinated afternoon, your cat) helps you see what actually matters for your goals. Not every metric deserves your attention—sometimes the small wins say more than the obvious spikes. In 2025, brands that get hyper-focused on a few clear objectives usually find it easier to connect the dots between their campaigns and results.

And let’s not ignore context. That viral post from July? Maybe it was less about your clever messaging and more about a timely meme or a trending news event. Stepping back to see the bigger picture (How did your engagement compare to the same quarter last year? Did your audience shift?) brings a bit of sanity to the process. It’s never just about raw numbers—sometimes it really is about reading between the lines and noticing what quietly changes over time.

6. Track Your Social Media Audit Results

Once you have your audit results in hand and make adjustments to your strategy, continue to track those audit results.

Monitor your key metrics, such as:

• Engagement
• Post shares
• Mentions
• Click-throughs
• Impressions
• Follower/Fan Growth
• Content by type

Look for percentage changes each month as compared with the previous one, and also yearly evaluations.

To learn more about this topic, check out this video by Neil Patel:

Free Social Media Audit Tools to Assess Your Social Performance

To simplify and speed up your social media audit process, utilize online tools as often as possible, many of which are free.

Become so familiar with how to use them, what you can learn from them, and how to incorporate them into your digital marketing decision-making.

To get you started, consider using any of the following free social media audit tools to save both time and resources.

• Native analytics on individual social media platforms (e.g., Twitter Analytics)
• Google Analytics, to measure your traffic, conversions, and sales
• Social media listening tools (e.g., TweetReach, Social Mention, HootSuite, Google Alerts)

There are other tools available that offer basic free versions along with paid versions. These include:

• Later’s Lite Instagram Analytics to track performance of past 30 posts to find content type with the highest engagement.
• Planoly for Instagram and Pinterest, allowing basic analytics for any chosen timeframe.
• Followerwonk for Twitter audits on brand mentions and social growth.

How Long Does a Social Media Audit Take?

The good news is that a social media audit doesn’t have to take days or even hours to complete.

Once you understand the process and follow each step, you can complete the audit in 15-30 minutes.

Once you compile your spreadsheet of social media accounts, familiarize yourself with each platform and any analytics it can provide.

Determine if any other social media tools will benefit your efforts, and set up accounts.

Finally, create a checklist of steps to use with each monthly and yearly audit.

You may also be interested in these articles:

• Social Media Challenges and how to use them as opportunities
• How to Become a Social Media Freelancer
• Interactive Posts for Social Media: how to approach and engage your audience

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Wrap Up

Social media is here to stay, and you can use it to your advantage when it comes to marketing efforts. An effective tool to help you reach that higher success is the audit of all of your accounts monthly and yearly.

Following simple steps, you can find out which platforms are high-performing and what content is creating the most engagement among your audience.

From there, you can begin to improve your social media marketing strategy, expand your reach, increase conversions, and grow sales. Continue to track your metrics, and you’ll always stay on top of your social media capabilities.

Looking for a way to organize and analyze your metrics in one central location?