What a social media audit should actually tell you
"Free audit" usually means a slide deck of things you already knew, ending in a retainer. Here is what one should contain instead.
It should tell you what to stop doing
Any audit can list opportunities. A useful one is willing to say that a channel is not worth your time, that a tactic is not working, or that the fix is not marketing at all. If everything in the document is an argument for more work, it is a proposal wearing an audit’s clothes.
It should be specific enough to act on tomorrow
"Improve your content strategy" is not a finding. "Your bio does not say what you sell, your link goes to a 404, and your three best-performing posts are all the same format you have not used since March" is a finding. The test is whether someone on your team could act on it without another meeting.
It should be prioritised by effort versus payoff
A list of thirty improvements is a way of avoiding a decision. Two or three things, in order, with a sense of what each costs you in time, is worth more than a comprehensive document nobody finishes reading.
Three red flags
- No numbers from your own account. If it could have been written without logging in, it was.
- Vanity metrics up front. Follower count is the least useful number in the report and the most likely to lead the summary.
- One recommended package. If the conclusion is the same regardless of what the data said, the data was decoration.
What ours looks like
Thirty minutes, a one-page output, prioritised by time saved against effort, with an explicit list of what we would leave alone. Free, and there is no obligation to build anything afterwards — ask for one here.