Social media content audit: a practical action plan

A social media content audit should tell you what to keep, repair and stop producing. A spreadsheet full of numbers is only the starting point. This guide builds an audit around the questions a customer needs answered, the content you already have and the route from a post to a useful enquiry.

Set a decision before collecting data

Choose the decision the audit must support. A small workshop might need more suitable booking enquiries; a software team might need fewer repeated setup questions. Write one primary outcome and the period you will examine. Use a period long enough to include your usual content cycle, then mark holidays, promotions and changes in paid distribution.

Separate this exercise from routine monthly reporting. Reporting follows agreed indicators. An audit questions whether the accounts, formats and indicators still serve the business. If no decision would change after seeing a number, it probably does not belong in the first version of your audit.

Build an inventory that another person can use

Create one row per post and keep its permanent link. Record the platform, publication date, subject, format, intended audience, next step and person responsible. Add whether the information is current and whether anyone can locate the original image or video. Missing production files can make an otherwise useful post expensive to update.

Field	What to record
Customer question	The specific question this post answers
Evidence	Demonstration, source or approved example
Destination	Working link and promised action
Decision	Keep, update, combine or retire
Owner	Person and review date

Keep a separate account register for access, profile links and recovery contacts. Do not put passwords into the content spreadsheet.

Compare posts with the same job

Group tutorials with tutorials and announcements with announcements. A support explanation can be valuable even when it reaches fewer people than an entertaining video. Record the exact metric name, the observation window and whether the post received paid support. Compare posts of similar age instead of giving an older post weeks of extra exposure.

Use ratios carefully. In an invented example, 18 useful enquiries from 600 tracked visits gives an enquiry rate of 3%. The calculation becomes misleading if enquiries cover a month and visits cover a week. A small sample can also move sharply after a single enquiry, so keep the counts beside the percentage.

Walk through the customer journey on a phone

Open the post as a visitor. Read the caption, follow the link and complete the intended action with test data where possible. Check language, loading, dates, form errors and confirmation messages. A popular post can send people to an expired offer; the audit should expose that problem before the next campaign.

For a workshop example, a post promising beginner classes should lead to beginner information, available dates and booking conditions. A generic homepage with several unrelated services creates extra work. Compare the journey with your Instagram profile audit so the profile and post tell the same story.

Prioritise fixes by customer impact

Repair incorrect information and broken destinations first. Then consider missing answers to frequent questions. Cosmetic changes can wait when a customer cannot understand the offer or submit a form. Assign one owner and a clear completion condition to each action.

• Repair: update an expired date and check the destination.
• Expand: add a missing setup step to a useful tutorial.
• Combine: bring overlapping explanations into one maintained resource.
• Retire: remove or clearly correct advice that no longer applies.

Keep a record of the old version when a change affects published claims. Do not erase a legitimate customer complaint simply because it makes the audit look untidy.

Finish with a short action register

Choose a manageable set of improvements and schedule a review. For each, write the problem, action, owner, deadline and evidence that would show improvement. A useful entry says “replace the broken booking link and verify the confirmation page”, not “improve engagement”.

Use the monthly reporting framework to follow the actions afterwards. If your team uses external services, keep their costs and delivery records separate from content quality findings. The current Rados Medya catalogue describes available services; an audit helps determine what work your business actually needs.