A social media management audit is a review of how a brand’s social accounts are set up, run and measured: who has access, how profiles look, what content is published, how the audience responds, how the team works and how results are reported. Running it before changing anything shows what is broken, what works and what is missing, so new plans build on evidence rather than on the last person’s habits.
This is the checklist we use when taking over an account or reviewing an in-house team’s work. It applies to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube and Pinterest, with small adjustments for each.
Why start with an audit instead of a new content plan?
A new plan written without an audit tends to repeat old mistakes. The team may already have tried a format that failed, or may be sitting on a content type that performs well but is posted rarely. Access problems, such as an ex-employee who still owns the Facebook Page, can block work later at the worst moment.
An audit for a brand with four or five active channels usually takes two to four days. The output is a short report with ranked findings and owners.
Step 1: Who has access to what?
Start with ownership and security, because everything else depends on it.
- List every account the brand owns, including old or inactive ones that still carry the brand name.
- In Meta Business Suite, check Business Settings for people, partners and assigned assets. Remove anyone who no longer needs access.
- On LinkedIn, review Page admins and their roles.
- For TikTok, YouTube and X, confirm which email address and phone number control the account and that they belong to the company, not an individual.
- Turn on two-factor authentication for every admin.
- Store recovery details in a company password manager.
Step 2: Are profiles consistent and complete?
Open each profile as a visitor would. Check the profile photo, cover image, bio, link and contact details. Are names and handles consistent across platforms? Does the bio say clearly what the company does? Is the link in bio current, or does it point to a campaign that ended last year?
On Instagram and TikTok, check that the account is a business or creator account so analytics are available. On Facebook and LinkedIn, check that opening hours, address and website match the company’s Google Business Profile.
Step 3: What has been published, and how did it perform?
Export the last 90 days of posts from each platform’s native analytics or your scheduling tool, such as Meta Business Suite insights, LinkedIn Page analytics, TikTok Studio or a tool like Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Later. Sort by reach and by engagement rate.
Questions to answer
- How often does each channel post, and is the cadence steady or bursty?
- Which formats get the most reach: Reels, carousels, single images, short video, text posts?
- Which topics get comments and shares rather than just likes?
- How many posts are purely promotional versus useful or entertaining?
- Are videos captioned, and are they made vertically for vertical platforms?
- Is the same post copied to every platform unchanged?
Write down the top five and bottom five posts per channel and look for patterns. The patterns matter more than any single post.
Step 4: How does the team handle community management?
Check comment and message response times. Open the inbox in Meta Business Suite and look at unanswered messages and comments over the last month. Look for negative comments left unanswered and questions that a short reply would have resolved.
Review whether there is a written policy for handling complaints, offensive comments and crisis situations. If there is not, that is a finding. Note whether saved replies or FAQs exist so the team does not rewrite the same answers daily.
Step 5: Is the workflow sustainable?
Look at how content is produced. Is there a calendar? Who writes, designs, approves and publishes? How long does approval take? Many social teams are slowed not by ideas but by approval chains that take a week for a single post.
- Is there a shared content calendar with at least two weeks of planned posts?
- Are brand guidelines, templates and tone of voice notes available to everyone who creates content?
- Is there a process for timely posts that cannot wait for full approval?
- Which tools are paid for, and are all of them used?
Step 6: Does reporting answer business questions?
Check what is reported and to whom. A monthly report full of follower counts and impressions, with no link to website visits, leads or sales, does not help leadership decide anything.
A useful report shows a few metrics per channel tied to goals: reach and engagement rate for awareness, link clicks and sessions from social in Google Analytics 4 for traffic, and leads or sales attributed to social for conversion. It also includes a short commentary on what changed and what the team will try next month.
Competitor snapshot
Add a quick look at three competitors: posting frequency, formats used and engagement on their top posts. The goal is not to copy them but to see gaps, such as a format your audience clearly enjoys that your brand never uses.
What should the audit report contain?
- A one-page summary of the most important findings.
- A ranked list of fixes by impact and effort: access issues first, then quick content wins, then process changes.
- The top and bottom performing posts per channel with notes on why.
- A recommended posting cadence per channel based on capacity, not ambition.
- Owners and dates for each fix.
For illustration, a regional restaurant group might find that an ex-agency still controls its Instagram, that Reels showing kitchen preparation outperform polished food photos, and that weekend messages wait two days for a reply. The fixes are clear: recover access, shift the content mix toward short kitchen videos, and set up weekend inbox cover.
Finally, check paid and organic together. If the brand runs social ads, confirm that ad comments are moderated too; they often collect questions and complaints that nobody sees because they do not appear in the organic inbox. In Meta Business Suite, ad comments appear under the inbox’s comments filter when the ad account is connected.