Social Media Audit Template: Free Checklist and Example

A social media audit is a structured review of every social account a brand owns. You list the accounts, check who can log in, read each profile the way a stranger would, pull the numbers for a fixed period, rank the posts, count how often you actually posted and look at whether the feed reads as one brand. Then you write down what to fix. Done properly it takes an afternoon for a small brand and a couple of days for a company with a dozen accounts.

The point is not the spreadsheet. The point is the short list of changes at the end of it. Most audits we have seen fail because they stop at the numbers: a tab of follower counts nobody reads again. A useful social media audit ends with five to ten fixes, each with an owner and a date, and a baseline you can compare against in three months.

This page gives you everything you need to run one yourself: a 10 step checklist, a social media audit template you can paste into Google Sheets or Excel, a filled in social media audit example for a small app, where each of the 11 big networks keeps its analytics, and a visual consistency check that most free templates skip. That last check matters more than people think. A feed with three fonts, two logos and stretched screenshots loses trust before anyone reads a caption, and no analytics dashboard will flag it for you.

If you are here for numbers only, our guide to social media KPIs covers the 20 metrics worth tracking with formulas, and the engagement rate calculator does the arithmetic per network. This page is about the audit itself: the order of work, what to look at and what to write down.

We built this checklist from the audits we run on our own accounts and on the brand kits people create in Spreadcast, then checked every platform detail against the platform's own help pages on October 28, 2026. For where the numbers live we used Instagram's help on insights and Account Status, LinkedIn's Page analytics help, YouTube's Analytics guide, Pinterest's analytics help, Meta's Threads Insights API reference and Telegram's channel statistics documentation.

For access and security we used Meta's help on adding people to a business portfolio, LinkedIn's Page admin roles and YouTube's channel permissions. For traffic we used Google's help on campaign URLs and the default channel group, plus Apple's help on App Store campaign links. For benchmarks we used the 2026 Rival IQ report and Buffer's 2026 engagement study; for audience fit, Pew Research Center and DataReportal. Tool prices come from each vendor's own pricing page on the same day.

The filled in example further down is made up for this page. It shows how to fill in the template; it is not data from a real company. Every other number on the page links to where it came from, and every source is listed at the bottom.

The first job in any social media audit is an inventory, and it is almost always longer than people expect. Brands collect accounts the way houses collect cables: a Pinterest board someone made for a launch, a YouTube channel from a conference talk, a Threads profile created automatically from Instagram, a Mastodon account an engineer set up during a busy week on another network. Each of those still carries your name.

Search every network for your brand name, your product name, your domain and any old names. Then look at the places that link to your profiles: your website footer, your App Store or Google Play listing, your email signature, press kit, old blog posts and partner pages. If a link points at an account you do not recognize, add it to the list and find out who made it.

For each account, make one decision. Keep means you will post there at least weekly for the next quarter. Merge means you will point people to another account and stop posting. Close means you will delete it, or at least archive it with a pinned post saying where you moved. Be honest here. Five accounts you post to every week beat eleven accounts you post to when you remember.

Before you close anything, export what is there. Instagram lets you review and export a copy of your information, which gives you every post and caption in one download. That archive is also handy for step five, because ranking posts is easier in a file than in an app.

A practical tip from our own audits: also search for impostor accounts. A profile using your logo and a slightly different handle is common for apps that get any traction, and it is easier to report one when you find it in an audit than when a customer emails you about it.

Access is the part of a social media audit that agencies skip and that causes the worst surprises. The questions are simple. Who can log in to each account? With what role? Does the main login use two factor authentication? Is the recovery email one the company controls, or a former intern's personal address?

On Facebook and Instagram, access runs through a Meta business portfolio. Meta's help on adding people to a business portfolio says you need full control of the portfolio to manage people, that people get basic access by default, and that you should assign only the level of access people need. It also suggests turning on two factor authentication for the portfolio. In practice, open Settings in Meta Business Suite, click People, and go down the list. Anyone who left gets removed today, not after the audit.

On Instagram itself, check two factor authentication through the Accounts Center. Instagram's help page on securing your Meta account with two factor authentication walks through the options. An authenticator app beats text messages; a security key beats both.

LinkedIn uses named roles. According to LinkedIn's help on Page admin roles, a Super admin has every permission, a Content admin creates and manages posts and events, and an Analyst can only see the Analytics tab. That last role is perfect for an outside auditor or a freelancer who needs numbers but should not post. YouTube has its own ladder. YouTube's channel permissions run from Owner and Manager down through Editor, Editor (Limited), Subtitle Editor, Viewer and Viewer (Limited). Give an auditor Viewer (Limited) and they can see the channel without touching revenue or uploads.

Write every name and role in the template's Owner and admins column. The finding we see most often is not a hacked account but an account nobody current can fully control: one person holds the only admin login, and they left. Fixing that before it becomes urgent is the cheapest win in the whole audit.

Open each profile logged out, on a phone, and read it as if you had never heard of the brand. That is how most people meet you: a profile tap from a comment, a share or a search. You have about one screen to say what you are.

Check six things on every profile. The display name should be the brand name people search for, not a tagline. The handle should be the same on every network, or as close as availability allows. The profile picture should be the same mark everywhere, cropped so it still reads inside a circle. The bio should say what the product does and for whom, in plain words. The link should work, load fast on a phone and land on a page that matches the bio. And the pinned post, if the network has one, should still be current.

Links deserve a closer look. Instagram has allowed up to five links in a bio since April 2023, so put the one that matters most first and remove the ones you no longer need. Mastodon can show a verified checkmark beside a link: per Mastodon's profile documentation, a link is verified when the page it points to links back to your profile with a rel="me" attribute. It also allows a 500 character bio by default and four extra profile fields. On Bluesky, you can use your own domain as your handle by adding a DNS record, which is the clearest proof that an account is really yours.

Character limits vary a lot between networks, so a bio written for Mastodon will not fit Instagram or TikTok. Our page on social media character limits lists every bio, name and caption limit by network if you are rewriting several at once.

Score each profile pass or fix in the template and write the problem in a few words: wrong link, old logo, bio describes a feature you removed. Keep it short. The audit report is a list of fixes, not an essay.

Pick one period and use it on every account. Ninety days is our default: long enough to smooth out one viral post or one quiet week, short enough that the content still reflects your current product. If this is your first social media audit ever, also pull the previous 90 days so you have a trend, not a single point.

Record three headline numbers first on every network: followers, interactions and reach. Followers at the start and end of the period tell you whether the audience grows. Interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves, replies, reposts) tell you whether people respond. Reach, or views where reach is not reported, tells you how many people saw anything at all. These three exist on almost every network, so they are the numbers you can compare across accounts and across quarters.

After those, add posts per week and the top three posts by interactions. If your goal is traffic or installs, add clicks and visits, covered in step eight. Our guide to social media KPIs explains the other metrics, such as saves, watch time and response time, if you need them for a specific goal. And if you want engagement rates, run the numbers through the engagement rate calculator rather than doing the division by hand for eleven networks.

Watch the history limits. Pinterest's analytics, per its help center, let you view custom ranges for the past year and a half plus real time estimates for the last 48 hours. Free scheduling tools often keep far less: Buffer's free plan keeps 30 days of insights history, and Metricool's free plan also shows 30 days. If you plan to audit quarterly, export or copy the numbers each time, because next quarter you may not be able to get them back.

Write down the date you pulled every number. Platforms revise recent figures, change definitions and occasionally rename metrics. When views replace impressions on a network halfway through your year, the date in your sheet is the only way to explain the jump.

If a brand's Instagram reach has dropped and nobody knows why, open Account Status before you change anything else. Instagram's help on Account Status says professional accounts can see there whether their content may be eligible to be recommended to people who do not follow them. From the same screen you can view a sample of posts that went against the Recommendations Guidelines, edit or remove them, or request a review if you disagree.

Instagram is careful to say that eligibility does not guarantee recommendation, and that ineligible accounts still reach their existing followers. But an account that has been marked as not eligible will see its reach outside the follower base fall, and no amount of posting at better times will fix that. In an audit, write the status in the template's Fixes column if it is anything other than fine.

Facebook, YouTube and TikTok have their own screens for guideline strikes and warnings. They are worth a click each during step four, especially if you post content from other people, music or anything that looks like a giveaway.

The content part of a social media audit answers one question: what should we make more of? Sort the period's posts by interactions, then by reach. Take the top five and the bottom five on each network and tag each one with three labels: format (single image, carousel, video, text only), topic (product update, tip, behind the scenes, customer quote, offer) and hook (the first line or the first frame).

Patterns appear within a dozen posts. On our own accounts, posts that show the product doing one specific thing beat posts that describe it, and carousels that teach one thing beat carousels that list ten. Your patterns will differ. The point is to write them down so the next quarter's plan is based on what your audience did, not on what a trend article said.

Look at the bottom five just as closely. A post that flopped is often a design problem rather than a topic problem: text too small to read on a phone, a screenshot so busy nobody can tell what to look at, or an image cropped badly on one network because it was made for another. Our breakdown of what makes a good social media post and the 35 creatives we analyzed give you a vocabulary for those notes.

If you run an app, check whether your posts show the app at all. Raw screenshots dropped into a square tend to read as a slideshow, a problem we cover in why app feeds look like a slideshow. And if the audit shows you mostly post when you remember, our list of 52 post ideas for apps is a quick way to fill the next quarter.

Finally, check the captions against each network's habits. A caption written for LinkedIn rarely works on Threads, and the same hashtag block on every network is a sign the posts were copied, not adapted. Note it in the template; it becomes a fix in step ten.

Benchmarks are the part of a social media audit most likely to mislead. Buffer's 2026 study looked at more than 52 million posts across 10 platforms and divides engagements by reach. Its 2025 medians are about 6.2% on LinkedIn, 5.6% on Facebook, 5.5% on Instagram, 4.6% on TikTok, 4.0% on Pinterest and 3.6% on Threads. Buffer notes that LinkedIn's rate includes clicks, which partly explains why it tops the list.

The 2026 Rival IQ report, now published by Quid, samples 150 companies in each of 18 industries and divides interactions by followers. Its all industry medians are 0.30% per post on Instagram, 2.01% on TikTok and 0.21% on YouTube. Same networks, numbers that differ by a factor of ten or more, and both are correct for their formula.

So the rule for your audit is simple: decide on one formula, use it on every account, and only compare yourself to a benchmark that uses the same one. If your native tools give you reach, compare against Buffer. If you only have follower counts, compare against Rival IQ. Write the formula at the top of your template so the next person who runs the audit uses it too.

Some networks do not fit a rate at all. Buffer reports Bluesky and Mastodon as interactions per post, with medians of about 4 and 3, and YouTube as views per video. For those, record the raw counts and compare each quarter against your own last audit. Your previous quarter is the most honest benchmark you have anyway.

Posting frequency benchmarks help with step six. Rival IQ's medians are about 3.7 posts a week on Instagram, 3 on Facebook and 2 videos a week on TikTok. If your audit shows one post a fortnight, that gap is a bigger issue than any engagement rate.

Count posts per week on each account for the period, then find the longest gap between two posts. Put both numbers in the template. This takes ten minutes and is often the most useful finding in the whole audit, because it explains most of the other numbers. Reach falls when you stop posting. Followers stall. The few posts you do publish get less traction because the account looks inactive to both people and ranking systems.

Look for the shape of the gaps too. Do posts bunch around launches and vanish in between? Does one network get everything and the others get leftovers a week later? Is there a pattern of posting on Mondays and then nothing? Each pattern has a different fix: a content calendar, batching, or handing the posting to a tool.

Most small teams know the answer before they finish counting. Nobody had time to design a post. That is not a discipline problem; it is a capacity problem. A social media content calendar helps you plan, and batching a month of content in one afternoon helps you produce. But if the audit shows the gaps line up with busy weeks every time, planning harder will not fix it.

This is the gap Spreadcast was built for. If your audit shows posts bunched around releases and nothing in between, Spreadcast watches your App Store listing every day, and when a new version goes live or the app reaches a ratings milestone, it designs the post in your brand, writes a caption for each network and publishes it, either on full autopilot or after one tap of approval. You can see what each plan includes on the pricing page.

Open the last nine posts on each network side by side. On Instagram the grid already does this; on other networks, take screenshots and paste them into one slide or one sheet. Nine is enough to see a pattern and few enough to finish in five minutes per account. Then score the seven rows on the scorecard.

Logo or app icon. Is it the same file every time, in the same corner, at a similar size? Watch for old versions of the logo that survived a redesign, logos stretched to fit, and logos recolored to match a background. Score 0 if you find two different logos in nine posts.

Brand colors. Pick out the colors in each post. A consistent feed uses two to four colors with the same codes every time. The common failure is near misses: four slightly different blues because each post was made from a different template. Score 0 if you cannot name your brand colors from the feed alone.

Fonts. Count the typefaces. One for headings and one for body text is plenty. A feed that switches between three or four fonts reads as several brands, even when the colors match. Note the worst offender by name, because it usually traces back to one template or one person.

Screenshots. For apps and software this is the biggest one. Are screenshots in the same device frame, from the current version of the product, at a size where the interface can actually be read? Mixed frames, outdated screens and screenshots shrunk into a corner all score low. Our free iPhone mockup generator puts a screenshot into a clean frame if you need to fix a few by hand.

Image sizes. Is each post made at the network's native size, or was a square posted everywhere? Look for text cut off by crops, especially on Pinterest pins, LinkedIn previews and Instagram's 4:5 portrait posts. The current pixel sizes for every network are on our social media image sizes page.

Text contrast. Can the text on each image be read on a phone in daylight? W3C's guidance for minimum contrast is a ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, defined as at least 18 point, or 14 point bold. Text that is part of a logo is exempt. Pale gray on white and white on a busy photo are the usual failures. Instagram also lets you write or edit alt text for a post, so check whether your posts carry a real description or none at all.

Profile set. Same name, same picture, same bio and the same link on every network. You already checked this in step three; carry the score over so the visual total is complete. Add up the seven rows for a score out of 14 per network and put it in the template.

Most visual drift has one root cause: there is no written rule, so every post is a fresh decision. The fix is a one page brand style guide with the logo files, the color codes, the two fonts, the screenshot frame and the post sizes. Our brand style guide template is built for exactly this, and our guide on what a brand kit needs covers the files to keep next to it.

If you do not have a kit at all, our free brand kit generator pulls colors, fonts and the logo from a website, which gives you a starting point in a minute. Then rebuild your post templates so every one uses the kit, and retire the old ones. Keeping old templates around is how drift comes back three months later. Our article on brand consistency without a design team goes deeper into keeping it that way when several people post.

For contrast, check each template once rather than each post. Design tools now have contrast checkers built in, so you can test the text color against the background color and see whether it passes the 4.5 to 1 ratio. Fix the template and every future post passes.

This is the second place Spreadcast fits naturally. When the audit finds three fonts, two logos and screenshots in mixed frames, Spreadcast fixes it at the source: paste your App Store link at Spreadcast's start page and it builds a brand kit from the listing, with your icon, colors and screenshots in an iPhone frame, and every post it designs uses that kit. Businesses without an app can start from a website or a short description of the brand. The visual score stops depending on who made the post that week.

Followers and likes are the start of the story. For most businesses the audit should also answer what social sends somewhere useful: website visits, signups, App Store page views or installs. This is the step that most often comes up empty, and almost always for the same reason: the links were never tagged.

For a website, use UTM parameters on every link you post. Google's help on campaign URLs says you should always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that values are case sensitive, and that lowercase should be your standard. So instagram and Instagram become two different rows in your reports if you mix them. Pick one spelling per network and write it in the template.

Google Analytics then groups the visits into channels. Per Google's default channel group, a visit counts as Organic Social when the source matches Google's list of social sites or the medium is one of a short list of values such as social, sm or social media. Paid social needs both a social source and a paid style medium. If your report shows social traffic under Referral or Unassigned, your mediums are probably inconsistent.

For an app, use App Store campaign links. You create a campaign in App Store Connect Analytics and get a link with a campaign token of up to 30 characters. Apple tracks impressions, product page views, downloads, sales and subscriptions per token, but campaigns only appear 24 hours after launch, and each metric only shows once it reaches 5 in the selected period. Our App Store campaign link generator builds one link per network in bulk so each network gets its own row.

In the template, record sessions or product page views per network for the audit period. If the numbers are tiny, that is a finding too. It usually means bios link to a home page instead of a page that matches the post, or posts carry no link at all on networks that allow one.

Pick three competitors or peers: one bigger than you, one about your size and one smaller or newer. Run the public parts of your checklist on them: the profile check from step three, the content ranking from step five using visible likes and comments, the posting count from step six and the visual score from step seven. Do not try to estimate their reach. You cannot see it, and guesses add noise.

Some native tools help. LinkedIn Page analytics includes a Competitors tab among its seven analytics types, which compares your Page with others you choose. Paid tools add more: Metricool's free plan analyzes up to five competitor profiles, and Hootsuite's Standard plan includes benchmarking against up to five competitors.

Write one line per competitor: the one thing they do better than you. It might be a format you never use, a posting rhythm, a visual style that makes every post recognizable, or a bio that explains the product in eight words. Those lines are the most actionable part of the competitor audit. A table of their follower counts is not.

Be careful not to copy. The aim is to find gaps in your own approach, not to look like someone else. If all three competitors post the same carousel style, doing it too will make you the fourth account nobody can tell apart.

Step one asked you to mark accounts keep, merge or close. Now you have the numbers to check that call. Start with where your audience is. Pew Research Center's 2026 fact sheet, published October 19, 2026 from a survey of 5,511 US adults, finds that 84% of US adults use YouTube, 70% use Facebook and about half use Instagram. Globally, DataReportal's Digital 2026 report counts 5.66 billion social media user identities, 68.7% of the world's population, with the typical internet user active on 6.75 platforms a month.

Those numbers say the audience is spread out, which is why most brands end up on several networks. They do not say you should be on all of them. For each account, ask three questions. Does our target customer use this network? Did this account produce interactions or traffic in the period? Can we post there at least weekly without hurting the others?

If the answer to the third question is no, close or pause the account and say so in a pinned post. A smaller set of active accounts beats a larger set of quiet ones. For app makers, our comparison of the best platforms for app promotion gives a starting view, and our social media statistics page has users per network if you need to justify the choice to someone else.

Newer networks deserve a fair look rather than a reflex. Threads and Bluesky are where many brands have started over; check Threads statistics and Bluesky statistics for current user numbers before deciding. Telegram channels behave differently again, with views per post as the main signal; our guide on how to grow a Telegram channel covers what to measure there.

A short compliance pass catches problems that are cheap to fix now and expensive later. Three checks cover most small brands.

First, paid partnerships. If creators or partners posted about you in exchange for money, free product or anything else of value, check that the posts were disclosed. Meta's branded content tools describe branded content as an organic post with a Paid partnership label that discloses the brand relationship. In the audit, list every partner post from the period and note whether the label or a clear written disclosure is there.

Second, other people's content. Reposted photos, user generated videos, music in Reels and screenshots of reviews all need permission or a license. Note any you cannot trace. Third, claims. Read the captions of your top posts for promises you cannot back up: fastest, number one, guaranteed. Those lines tend to survive in old posts long after anyone remembers writing them.

None of this needs a lawyer for a first pass. It needs someone to read the period's posts with these three questions in mind and add a line to the fix list for each problem.

Read the example the way you would read your own. Four findings stand out, and none of them is about follower counts.

Access first. A former freelancer still has access to Instagram, and two factor authentication is off on the main account and on Pinterest. Those are the first two fixes, both done the same day. Nobody knows who controls Pinterest, and the account has not posted in the whole period, so it gets closed after its pins are exported.

Consistency second. Every kept account averages about one post a week, with gaps of three to four weeks. The gaps line up with the weeks Alex was shipping releases, which is exactly when the app had the most to say. That is the pattern we described in step six: the problem is capacity, not ideas.

Visuals third. Scores of 7, 9 and 6 out of 14 mean the feed does not look like one brand. In the example, the Instagram carousels use the app's colors but a different font from the LinkedIn posts, and the Threads posts use raw screenshots without a frame. The fix is one kit and one set of templates used everywhere.

Traffic last. The Instagram bio links to the home page, not the App Store, and no posts carry campaign links, so 38 product page views is a floor rather than the real number. Fixing the link and tagging posts by network makes next quarter's numbers usable.

The resulting fix list has eight lines: remove the freelancer, turn on two factor, export and close Pinterest, rewrite the Threads bio, point the Instagram link at the App Store with a campaign link, make a one page style guide, rebuild templates from it, and set a weekly posting rhythm of three posts per network with release posts planned in advance. The goals for next quarter are written in the same three numbers: followers, interactions and reach per network.

Run a full social media audit once a quarter. That is often enough to catch drift and short enough that each audit has 90 days of data to work with. Between audits, a ten minute monthly check of the three headline numbers and posts per week is plenty.

Run an extra audit at three moments. When someone new takes over social, so they start from a clear baseline. Before a launch or a rebrand, so you know which accounts and templates need updating. And after any sudden drop in reach, where the access, Account Status and posting gap checks usually find the cause faster than anything else.

Keep each quarter on its own tab in the same sheet. By the third audit you will have a trend line per network, which is worth more than any external benchmark. It also makes the report easy to write: copy last quarter's tab, update the numbers, and the changes jump out.

If you report to a manager, an investor or a client, put the next audit date in the report itself. It turns the audit from a one off project into a routine. Our page on a startup marketing budget shows where the time for this sits next to everything else a small team pays for.

Agencies and freelancers run the same ten steps with two changes. First, ask for access the right way. Request an Analyst role on LinkedIn, a Viewer role on YouTube and partner or basic access through the client's Meta business portfolio, rather than asking for passwords. Those roles let you see the numbers without the power to post or delete, and they are easy for the client to remove when the work ends.

Second, separate findings from recommendations. Clients take an audit more seriously when the first half is plainly factual (here is what we found, with dates and screenshots) and the second half is clearly your opinion (here is what we would change and why). Mixing the two makes every finding sound like a sales pitch.

Deliver the one page report first and the full template as an appendix. Walk the client through the access findings in person or on a call, because those sometimes involve former staff or partners and deserve a careful conversation.

If the client's main problem turns out to be capacity rather than strategy, say so. Our guide on whether to hire a social media manager compares the options with real prices, and the real cost of social media management shows what design time adds up to when every post is made by hand.

Auditing different periods on different networks. Thirty days on Instagram and 90 on LinkedIn produce numbers you cannot compare. Pick one window and stick to it.

Adding reach, impressions and views together. They measure different things on different networks. Keep them in separate cells and label which one each network reports.

Comparing against the wrong benchmark. A reach based rate of 4% looks terrible next to a follower based benchmark of 0.30% only if you do not notice they use different formulas. They are not comparable at all.

Stopping at the numbers. A tab of figures with no fix list is not an audit; it is an export. If you only have time for half the steps, do steps one, two, six and ten.

Skipping the visual check. Analytics will never tell you that your feed uses three fonts. Readers notice anyway, and the inconsistency costs you trust on every post.

Auditing once. The value of an audit comes from the second and third, when you can see whether the fixes worked. Book the next one before you finish this one.

Most audits of small brands end with the same three fixes: post more consistently, make the feed look like one brand, and cover more networks without more hours. Here is what that looks like before and after.

Before: you open Canva or Figma, find a template that is close, swap in a screenshot, adjust the colors to roughly match the last post, export a square, write a caption, then repeat the caption with small edits for LinkedIn, Threads and Bluesky, upload each one by hand, and forget Telegram entirely. Each post can take the better part of an hour, so it happens when there is a free hour, which is why the audit found four week gaps.

After: you paste your App Store link once at the start page. Spreadcast builds a brand kit from the listing, with your icon, colors and screenshots in an iPhone frame. When a new version ships or the app reaches a ratings milestone, it designs the post in that kit, writes a caption for each network within its limits and publishes to Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, on autopilot or after one tap. For anything else, you type one line in Create or pick one of twelve post types for apps, and get a designed single image or carousel. You can also upload your own pictures and video to the same calendar.

The next audit then gets easier too. Analytics shows followers and interactions per network and likes, comments, reach and views per post in one place, so step four takes minutes. If you work in Claude or ChatGPT, the Spreadcast MCP server lets the assistant read those numbers and draft the next week's posts for your approval. The full feature list is on the features page, and the pricing page shows what each plan includes, from a $19 Post Pack to Pro at $29 a month.

Spreadcast will not do the access check, the competitor review or the compliance pass for you. Those stay with you. What it removes is the reason most audits find the same gaps quarter after quarter: nobody had time to design the post.