Social Media Audit Checklist

List the channels in scope this quarter — typical set is LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Threads. Exclude any channel the brand has formally sunset; an inactive Pinterest with stale pinned content is a brand-risk finding on its own.

Screenshot the profile header, bio, pinned post, and link-in-bio destination for each channel in scope. These are the before-state record for the audit deliverable and protect against arguments about whether a finding existed at audit time.

Handles should match across channels where possible (@brandname). Flag any squatted handles on platforms where the brand isn't active — secure them before a competitor or impersonator does. Display names should match the legal or DBA name used in advertising.

Bios should reflect the current positioning statement and ICP language, not last year's tagline. Check character limits per platform — LinkedIn company tagline is 120 characters; X bio is 160; Instagram is 150. Truncated bios are an instant credibility hit.

Click every bio link, link-in-bio destination, and pinned-post link. Confirm UTM source / medium / campaign follow the team convention so GA4 attribution stays clean. Common breakage: a link-in-bio tool sub-link points to a 404 from a retired campaign landing page.

Export from Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or each platform's native analytics. Capture post date, format, copy, link, and engagement rate per row. The tracker is the working artifact for the rest of this section.

Tag each post with its editorial pillar — thought leadership, product, customer story, culture, promotional. Most teams target a 4-1-1 or 70/20/10 mix; flag any pillar that has drifted to over-index on promo content.

Sample 10-15 posts per channel against the brand voice guide. Watch for AI-generated copy that drifts into corporate-bland phrasing, emoji usage that conflicts with the guide, and AP vs. house style inconsistencies (Oxford comma, em-dash spacing, sentence-case headlines).

Any post involving a paid creator, gifted product, or affiliate relationship needs an FTC-compliant disclosure — #ad at the top of the caption, not buried in 30 hashtags, plus the platform's Paid Partnership label where available. Check creator posts about the brand too; their material connection requires disclosure even when the post wasn't formally paid.

WCAG 2.1 AA expects descriptive alt text on every meaningful image and captions on every video. LinkedIn, Instagram, and X all support alt text fields — most teams skip them. Sample 20 recent posts; missing alt text on more than 30% is a finding for the report.

Calculate posts-per-week per channel for the last 90 days. Compare against the documented cadence target — common defaults are 3-5x weekly on LinkedIn, 1-2x daily on X, 4-7x weekly on Instagram. Multi-week gaps are the most common finding.

Each platform's native analytics shows when followers are active. Cross-reference with current scheduled send times — many teams set a calendar in 2022 and never revisited it as audience time zones shifted.

Open Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, or Loomly and review the next 30 days of scheduled content. Look for empty days, content stacking on Mondays, and approval-pending posts that have aged past their relevance window.

Draft a 30-60 day calendar that hits the cadence target without piling promotional content into the same week. Sequence pillar content first, then plug in promotional and timely posts around it. Route to the content lead for sign-off before queueing.

Pull average first-response time from Sprout or the platform inbox. B2B benchmark is under 4 business hours; B2C consumer brands target under 1 hour. Anything over 24 hours on a customer-service question is a finding worth flagging.

Rank by engagement rate (engagements ÷ reach), not raw likes — a post that reached 500 people and got 50 engagements outperforms one that reached 50,000 and got 100. Note format, topic, and posting time of the top 10 per channel for the calendar rebuild.

Use Sprout Listening, Brandwatch, or Meltwater to surface mentions and tag sentiment. Flag any negative-sentiment cluster larger than usual baseline — a single angry customer is normal; a coordinated thread or trending complaint is a comms event.

Open a comms ticket with the thread links, timeline, and sentiment summary. Loop in PR and legal if the thread mentions product safety, regulatory claims, or named employees. Do not respond publicly until the holding statement is approved.

Pull customer-generated posts worth amplifying — testimonials, unboxings, in-the-wild product shots. Confirm rights via DM before reposting; a screenshot is not a license. Log approvals in the UGC tracker with creator handle and post URL.

Capture quarter-over-quarter follower growth, reach, and impressions per channel. Native analytics is the source of truth — third-party tools sometimes lag or sample. Note any channel where reach declined more than 15% QoQ for the recommendations section.

Open GA4 Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and check that social sources are tagged consistently (linkedin / cpc vs. linkedin.com / referral is a common drift). Audit the team's UTM convention doc and reconcile any one-off campaigns that broke convention.

In GA4, segment to social source / medium and pull primary conversion rate against site average. Validate that the conversion event is firing on actual submit, not a blur or page-view proxy — a mis-mapped event will inflate reported conversions 3-5x and distort budget allocation.

Compare engagement rate, follower growth, and CTR against published benchmarks from Rival IQ, Sprout's annual index, or HubSpot's industry report. Pick benchmarks matched to industry and follower-tier; a 10K-follower B2B SaaS account should not benchmark against a 5M-follower CPG brand.

Package findings into a deck or doc — baseline screenshots, content-mix chart, cadence analysis, top posts, sentiment summary, conversion data, prioritized recommendations. Walk through with the marketing director and tag each recommendation with an owner and target date for the next quarter's planning.