Social Media Audit Template: 42 Scored Checks
A social media audit is a full review of every profile you own — what state it is in, what it published, how that performed and who still has the password. This free social media audit template runs 42 concrete checks across nine platforms, scores each one by impact, and hands you a ranked fix list instead of a blank grid. No email, no download, nothing leaves your browser.
Step 1 — Inventory every profile, including the ones you forgot
Mark each of the nine platforms active, dormant or unused. Dormant means the profile exists and still represents you, but you are not posting. Those are the accounts that leak brand consistency and DMs.
0 active · 0 dormant · 9 unused
Answer the checks below and the score, section breakdown and fix list build as you go.
Step 2 — Score the 42 checks
Pass, partly, or fail. Each check carries an impact weight, so a failed high-impact check costs you three times what a failed polish check does — and rises to the top of the fix list. Tap a chosen answer again to unset it.
Profile and brand consistency (9 checks)
Whether someone landing on any of your profiles can tell in four seconds who you are, what you do and where to go next.
Read each bio as a stranger would. If line one is a slogan, a set of emoji or your own name, it is not doing the job.
Mismatched handles break word of mouth. If the exact handle is gone, use one consistent variant everywhere rather than a different one per network.
Most people see your avatar at comment size. Shrink it in a preview and see whether the mark survives.
Test it on a phone, on cellular data. An untagged link means every visit it sends is filed as direct traffic.
The display name field is searchable on most networks; the handle alone rarely is. "Ada Lopez | Dog Trainer" beats "Ada Lopez".
Personal accounts get thin data. Creator, Business or Professional accounts unlock the numbers the rest of this audit needs.
Pinned posts are the most valuable real estate you own and the most commonly stale.
An email button, open DMs or a contact link. Count how many taps it takes a buyer to reach a human.
A profile that last posted two years ago still ranks, still collects DMs and still represents you. Decide its fate deliberately.
Content and creative (8 checks)
Whether what you publish is built for each platform, or one asset copied nine times.
Pillars are the recurring themes you can plan against. If nobody can name them, the calendar is improvised.
Exported-with-watermark clips are the single most visible sign of a cross-posted feed.
Length, tone, link behaviour and hashtag norms differ per network. The same words cannot be right everywhere.
Assume nobody expands the caption and nobody unmutes. Does the post still land?
Auto-captions mangle names, prices and product terms. Those are exactly the words that matter.
Alt text serves screen-reader users first and gives platforms and search engines a text signal second.
The single highest-value hour of any audit. Not the list — the sentence explaining what the five share.
If a post worked and the fact is still true, it can run again. Most teams never look back.
Cadence and consistency (6 checks)
Whether publishing is a system with an owner and a calendar, or something that happens when someone remembers.
"Three Reels and two carousels a week" is a plan. "Regularly" is not, and cannot be audited next quarter.
Count what you shipped against what you promised. A plan missed by half is a fiction, not a target.
Scroll each profile's grid. Long silences read as abandonment to both humans and ranking systems.
Your audience's active hours are in your own native analytics. A published average is a starting guess.
Two weeks of visible runway is the difference between a strategy and a scramble.
One person with the password and the context is the most common single point of failure in social.
Audience and engagement (7 checks)
Whether you measure performance the way each platform measures it, and against a published benchmark rather than a feeling.
Per follower on Instagram and Facebook, per view on TikTok, per impression on LinkedIn. One formula for all of them produces numbers that cannot be compared.
A rate with no benchmark cannot be judged. Use the benchmark panel in this tool for the five platforms where a sourced figure exists.
Plus 500 followers means something different at 2,000 than at 200,000. The rate is the comparable figure.
Most teams discover their audience is in a different country or a decade older than the personas assume.
Check the oldest unanswered message in every inbox, including the message-request folders nobody opens.
Named, not "the market". Same period, same metrics, same denominators, or the comparison means nothing.
Saves and shares are the signals that correlate with distribution. Likes are the ones that feel good.
Conversion and tracking (6 checks)
Whether you can trace a post to a result. This is the section that decides if social is a cost or a channel.
Without UTMs, social traffic lands in direct or referral and the channel looks worthless in your analytics.
A signup, a booking, a purchase, a lead, a reply. "Awareness" is not an event and cannot be counted.
One saved segment or report you can open without rebuilding it each month.
Click your own last five links. A generic homepage after a specific promise is the most common leak.
If part of the plan is platform revenue, know the published eligibility thresholds rather than guessing at them. The panel below has them.
Boosted posts hide inside organic reporting and quietly flatter the channel.
Governance, security and access (6 checks)
Whether you would still control the accounts if a phone was lost or a contractor left. The section every template skips.
The email account is the real key. Securing the profile and leaving its recovery inbox open secures nothing.
Open each platform's users or partners panel and read the list out loud. There is usually a surprise.
Business Manager, a brand account or the platform's equivalent. Personal ownership is a resignation away from a lost channel.
Recovery details usually point at the phone of whoever set the account up, three jobs ago.
Every tool trialled and abandoned may still hold a token that can post as you.
An audit nobody reads changes nothing. Every fix needs a name against it and a date.
Step 3 — Your ranked fix list
Every check you did not pass, ordered by the points you would recover. Work top down.
Step 4 — Check engagement against a published benchmark
Engagement rate is measured differently on every platform — per follower on Instagram and Facebook, per view on TikTok, per impression on LinkedIn. Compare like with like or the comparison is meaningless. Each row below asks for the denominator that platform's benchmark was actually built on, so the comparison is like for like.
Step 5 — Monetization eligibility (optional)
Only relevant if platform revenue is part of the plan. These are published eligibility thresholds, not earnings estimates. Neither TikTok nor YouTube publishes a payout rate per view. TikTok's own terms set rewards at its sole discretion and reserve the right to cap them. Every per-view figure here is an independent estimate, and real earnings vary several-fold by niche, audience country and season. For most creators, brand deals generate far more income than platform payouts. Instagram in particular has no ad-revenue-share programme for Reels.
TikTok Creator Rewards first-party
Requires 10,000 authentic followers and 100,000 authentic views in the last 30 days, age 18+, a personal account only, and videos of at least 60 seconds.
Source: TikTok Creator Rewards Program Terms (US), read 2026-09-24. TikTok publishes no payout rate at all — its terms set rewards at its own discretion.
YouTube Partner Program first-party
Ad revenue needs 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 watch hours in 365 days or 10,000,000 Shorts views in 90 days. Fan funding opens earlier, at 500 subscribers with 3,000 watch hours or 3,000,000 Shorts views. Watch hours and Shorts views never add together.
Source: YouTube Help, read 2026-09-24. YouTube publishes the revenue split, never a resulting RPM.
Instagram independent
Instagram has no ad-revenue-share programme for Reels — there is no Instagram equivalent of the YouTube Partner Program. Direct Meta money on Instagram is fan funding. Those features generally require 10,000+ followers, age 18+, and a professional (creator or business) account. Availability: not global — most of north america and europe, select apac and latam.
The no-ad-revenue-share fact is first-party (Facebook for Creators — Facebook Content Monetization). The thresholds are from Influencer Marketing Hub and are not first-party verified, read 2026-09-24 — confirm in the app before you plan against them.
Take the audit with you
The CSV carries every check, its weight, your answer, the section scores, the ranked fix list and the benchmark sources. The file is assembled in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and there is no email step.
Show the maths
check points = weight × (pass 1 · partly 0.5 · fail 0)
score = round(points earned ÷ points possible on answered checks × 100)
section score = round(section points earned ÷ section points possible × 100)
fix rank = points recoverable (weight − points earned), then section order, then check order
engagement rate = interactions ÷ platform's own denominator × 100
Weights: high impact 3, medium 2, polish 1. All 42 checks together are worth 91 points. Your score is calculated only over the checks you answered, which is why the header shows how many that is — a score from six checks is not a score.
Grade bands: 85 and above strong, 70–84 solid with gaps, 50–69 needs work, below 50 rebuild.
Nothing here is randomised and no figure is estimated in code. Benchmarks and eligibility thresholds are imported from one audited data file, each carrying its publisher, whether the platform itself published it, and the date we read it. Last full verification pass: 2026-09-24; re-checked at least every 90 days.
Payouts run on qualified or monetized views, which are a fraction of public view count. Estimates built on a raw view number will always come in high.
What a social media audit actually is
A social media audit is a scheduled review of every social account connected to your name or brand, measured against a fixed list of checks so that two audits six months apart are comparable. It answers four questions: which profiles exist, whether each one still represents you properly, what the numbers did over a defined period, and what you are going to change. It is not a report. A report describes what happened; an audit decides what to do about it.
The reason most audits fail is not laziness — it is that the template stops at collection. You fill in fourteen columns of followers, impressions and engagement, and then you are staring at a grid with no idea which row matters. That is why every check in this template carries an impact weight of 1, 2 or 3, and why the output is a prioritised list. A broken, untagged link in the bio and a missing alt text are not the same size of problem, and a template that treats them as equal wastes your quarter.
One structural note before you start. A social media audit is not the same document as a strategy or a monthly report, and mixing them is how all three end up half-done. The audit tells you the current state. Feed its findings into your social media strategy template to decide what changes, and into your social media report template to track whether the change worked.
How to do a social media audit in 11 steps
This is the order the tool above follows. Work top to bottom — several steps depend on the one before, and doing them out of sequence is how teams end up benchmarking a profile they should have closed.
- Inventory every profile, including the zombies. Search your brand name on all nine platforms and list what comes back: the accounts you run, the accounts you abandoned, the test account from a rebrand, and any profile a former employee created. Mark each one active, dormant or unused. Dormant profiles still rank in search, still collect DMs and still represent you — deciding their fate is a step, not an afterthought.
- Write the goal for each active platform. One sentence per platform, naming the audience and the outcome. If two platforms have the identical goal, one of them is probably a copy-paste destination rather than a channel.
- Check brand consistency end to end. Handle, display name, profile photo, bio, link, category and pinned content, compared side by side across profiles. Handles drift the most, because the good one is usually taken on the platform you joined last — our Instagram handle checker is the fastest way to see which variant is actually free before you standardise.
- Open every platform's native analytics for the period. Not a third-party dashboard, not a screenshot from last quarter. Native, for a fixed date range, so the field definitions are the platform's own. Set the same range on every platform or the comparison is worthless.
- Pull your top five posts per platform and write the pattern down. The highest-value hour in the whole audit. The list is not the deliverable; the sentence explaining what those five have in common is. Then plan three posts from it before you move on.
- Calculate engagement the way each platform measures it. Per follower on Instagram and Facebook, per view on TikTok, per impression on LinkedIn. Using one formula everywhere produces a table of numbers that cannot legitimately be compared to each other or to any published benchmark.
- Benchmark against a dated, published figure. A rate on its own tells you nothing. The tool above compares 5 of the nine platforms against published benchmark studies and openly says that the other 4 have no credible published figure, rather than inventing one.
- Check who your audience actually is. Age, location and language from native analytics, held up against the persona your content is written for. This is the step that most often ends an argument, because the audience is frequently in a different country or a decade older than the deck claims.
- Follow the conversion path. Click your own links on a phone. Confirm every profile and campaign link carries UTM parameters, that social traffic is segmented in your analytics, and that each platform has one named conversion event. Untagged links are why social looks worthless in so many analytics reports — it is filed as direct traffic. Decide which numbers you will hold yourself to with our guide to the social media KPIs that actually matter.
- Audit access and security before you finish. Two-factor on every account and on the recovery inbox behind it, the access list reviewed for people who left, business ownership rather than someone's personal login, and third-party app tokens revoked where you cannot name a current use. Almost no audit template includes this section, and it is the one that prevents a catastrophe rather than a bad quarter.
- Turn findings into owned, dated actions and share them. Export the fix list, put a name and a date against each item, and book the review. An audit nobody is accountable for changes nothing by definition.
What is inside the template
The 42 checks are grouped into 6 sections worth 91 weighted points in total. Every check is answerable from a profile page or a native analytics screen in under a minute — there are no checks that require a paid tool, and none that ask you for a number the platform no longer reports.
| Section | Checks | Points | High impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profile and brand consistency Whether someone landing on any of your profiles can tell in four seconds who you are, what you do and where to go next. | 9 | 19 | 2 |
| Content and creative Whether what you publish is built for each platform, or one asset copied nine times. | 8 | 17 | 3 |
| Cadence and consistency Whether publishing is a system with an owner and a calendar, or something that happens when someone remembers. | 6 | 12 | 1 |
| Audience and engagement Whether you measure performance the way each platform measures it, and against a published benchmark rather than a feeling. | 7 | 16 | 2 |
| Conversion and tracking Whether you can trace a post to a result. This is the section that decides if social is a cost or a channel. | 6 | 12 | 2 |
| Governance, security and access Whether you would still control the accounts if a phone was lost or a contractor left. The section every template skips. | 6 | 15 | 3 |
The scoring is deliberately simple and shown on the page: a pass earns the check's full weight, "partly" earns half, a fail earns nothing, and your score is the percentage of the points available on the checks you have actually answered. Unanswered checks are not counted as failures — they are reported as coverage, because a score built on six checks is not a score. The tool also shows the range you would land in across all 42 checks depending on how the rest go.
The profile inventory treats nine platforms as first-class rows: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube including Shorts, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Threads, Pinterest and Bluesky. That matters more than it sounds. Most audit grids in circulation were built around the 2019 set of five networks, and several still ask you for Instagram Impressions and Plays — fields Instagram retired in favour of Views in April 2025. An audit that asks for a number the platform no longer reports gets abandoned halfway through.
How often should you audit?
Quarterly, with a full pass twice a year. A quarter is long enough that engagement trends mean something and short enough that a broken bio link, a dormant profile or an ex-contractor's access does not sit there for months. In the two intermediate quarters, run the short version: brand consistency, cadence, engagement against benchmark, and the access review.
Override the calendar for three events. A rebrand, because every bio, avatar and handle changes at once. A change of hands — new agency, new hire, someone leaving — because that is an access audit whether you call it one or not. And a platform changing what it reports, which happens more often than the annual planning cycle allows for.
Agencies should run a compressed version as step one of every client onboarding. It is the fastest way to find the work nobody mentioned in the pitch: the dormant profile with 8,000 followers, the link that has been broken since spring, the former freelancer still listed as an admin.
Three sample social media audits
The same 42 checks, three different jobs. Load the worked example in the tool above to see a filled-in version of the second one.
- The solo creator, 40 minutes. Two or three active platforms. Score all 42 checks quickly, but spend the real time on two: the top-five-posts pattern and the bio's first line. Creators almost always score well on cadence and badly on conversion, because there is no named conversion event anywhere. Skip nothing in the security section — a single account is a single point of failure.
- The in-house brand team, half a day. Five to seven active profiles, at least one dormant. The inventory step alone usually turns up a forgotten regional account. Expect the lowest scores in conversion and tracking, because UTMs are inconsistent across campaigns, and in governance, because access lists accumulate people. Export the CSV, assign each fix an owner, and re-run the audit next quarter against the same grid.
- The agency onboarding a client, 90 minutes. Run it before the strategy work, not after. The score becomes your baseline and your evidence: a 41 out of 100 at handover and a 78 a quarter later is the single most persuasive slide in a retainer review. Run the same grid on the client's three named competitors and you have a market position rather than an opinion. This is also where the access review earns its keep — you cannot manage accounts you do not properly control.
Whichever version you run, the audit only pays off if the fix list turns into published work. That is the bridge between the audit and growing a social media presence rather than just measuring one.
Measure engagement the way each platform measures it
This is the single most common error in audits, and it is built into most templates. Engagement rate has a different denominator on every platform, so the rates are not comparable to each other and can only be judged against a benchmark computed the same way.
- Instagram — per follower. Socialinsider — Instagram Benchmarks reports 0.37%–0.55% across formats, averaging 0.48%, from 35M posts across 447,613 profiles over January 2025 – December 2025.
- TikTok — per view. 3.75%–4.40%, averaging 3.85%, from 2M videos across 214,507 profiles. Per view, not per follower, which is why TikTok's number looks so different.
- LinkedIn — per impression. 3.25%–7.00% by format, averaging 5.20%, from 1.3M posts across 16,645 business pages. LinkedIn's 5.20% is not "ten times better than Instagram" — it is a different fraction with a different denominator.
- YouTube — per subscriber. A single published median of 0.21%, from Quid (formerly Rival IQ) — 2026 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. No range was published, so the tool shows it as a median rather than pretending to a band.
Every figure above is an independent study, not a platform statement, and each one is dated in the tool with a link to its source. Four of the nine platforms in the inventory — X, Threads, Pinterest and Bluesky — have no benchmark we could verify, so the tool says so and tells you to audit against your own previous period instead of printing a made-up number.
The same honesty applies to money. If platform revenue is part of your plan, the tool lists the published eligibility thresholds — YouTube's ad-revenue tier, for instance, requires 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 watch hours in 365 days or 10,000,000 Shorts views in 90 days, and the two paths never combine. What it will not do is estimate your earnings: neither TikTok nor YouTube publishes a payout rate per view, and any tool that quotes you one is repeating an estimate.
Social media audit tools you actually need
An audit needs fewer tools than the software market suggests. In order of value:
- Each platform's native analytics. Non-negotiable and free. They are the only source where the field definitions are the platform's own, and the only place demographics are reliable.
- This template, for structure and scoring. Its job is to stop you drifting into the metrics you enjoy looking at and to force a ranked output.
- A spreadsheet, for the trend. Export the CSV each quarter into the same sheet. Four quarters of the same 42 checks is worth more than any single audit.
- A scheduling tool, only once the fix list exists. Most teams buy this first and audit never. If you are weighing options, we keep an honest breakdown of the best Hootsuite alternatives, including where competitors beat us.
- Our other free tools for the specific fixes the audit throws up — handle availability, bio rewrites, UTM tagging and caption work all have a dedicated tool in the Outfeed AI free tools library.
What you do not need is a paid platform to run the audit itself. Every check in this template is answerable from a profile page and a native analytics screen.
From fix list to published work
The audit ends with a ranked list of things to change. Most of them are publishing work: rewrite the bios, adapt captions per platform instead of pasting one everywhere, fill two weeks of calendar, revive or close the dormant profiles. That is the slow part, and it is what Outfeed AI exists for. It is a chat-first AI social media manager: you describe the post, it writes it in your brand voice, shows a per-platform preview, and schedules and publishes to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest and Bluesky from one conversation — the same nine platforms this template audits.
Starter is $29 a month and Pro is $59 a month, both flat rates rather than per seat — unlike Hootsuite and Sprout Social, which bill per seat from their entry tier. Outfeed AI only charges per seat at the Agency tier, at $149 per seat per month. The free trial runs 3 days and includes 100 AI credits; a card is required to start it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media audit template?
A social media audit template is the structured checklist you work through when you review every social account you own: what state each profile is in, what you published, how it performed, what it converted, and who still has access. Most templates are a blank grid you fill in and then have to interpret yourself. This one is scored — each of the 42 checks carries an impact weight, so when you mark it pass, partly or fail you get a score out of 100, a breakdown for each of the 6 sections, and a fix list ordered by the points you would recover. You finish with a ranked action list rather than a filled-in spreadsheet.
How do I do a social media audit?
Start by listing every profile that exists in your name, including the dormant ones nobody posts to, then work in a fixed order: confirm each profile's goal, check brand consistency across handle, photo, bio and link, open each platform's native analytics for the period, pull your top five posts and write down what they share, benchmark engagement against a published figure using that platform's own denominator, check audience demographics against who you think you are talking to, review who has access and whether two-factor is on, then turn the gaps into owned, dated actions. The tool on this page walks that process and scores it as you go, so nothing gets skipped and the output is prioritised.
How often should you do a social media audit?
Quarterly is the rhythm that works for most teams: frequent enough to catch a broken link or a dormant profile before it costs you anything, spaced enough that you are measuring a real trend rather than noise. Run a full audit twice a year and a shortened version — brand consistency, cadence, engagement and access — in the other two quarters. Three events should trigger an audit regardless of the calendar: a rebrand, a change in who runs the accounts, and any platform changing its metrics, which happened when Instagram moved to reporting Views in place of Impressions and Plays in April 2025 and quietly broke every audit grid built on the old fields.
Is this social media audit template free, and does my data leave the browser?
It is free with no email, no signup and no download gate, which is unusual for this kind of template. Everything runs in your own browser: the checks, the weighting, the scoring, the engagement maths and the CSV export are all built into the page, so your answers and your numbers never reach a server. Refreshing the page clears them. Use it for as many brands or client accounts as you like.
Audit done. Now work the list.
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