Instead, your goal should rather be to make sure that your brand has a strong presence on the social platforms that its target audience uses. A social media audit will be able to help you identify which channels and type of content work best. It’s not the most exciting part of social media marketing, but it needs to be done (at least once a year). To help you with your social media management audit, we’ve created a free template on Google Sheets. The best approach would be to use this spreadsheet in conjunction with one (or more) of the following social media tools. Most of these tools will give you the information you need to complete the information required about your best posts.
Free Social Media Audit Tools to Evaluate Your Social Performance:
What’s Meant by Social Media Auditing?
In short, social media auditing refers to the process of listing all your social media accounts and including as many details about them. This information will help you to assess if the social media channels on which you’re active suit your brand and if your individual accounts are managed effectively. This exercise will also help you to identify any outdated or unofficial social media accounts that use your brand’s name.
How Often Should You Complete a Social Media Audit?
Ideally, you should have a once-a-year full-scale audit as well as monthly reviews. Your yearly review, which should be carried out more or less at the same time each year, will analyze all your accounts in detail to determine if it’s wise to continue using that platform. The focus of your monthly reviews will be more on the content. You’ll study the analytics of the content that you’ve shared that month to help you identify which types of posts your target audience engages with better. If you partner with influencers, you can take your monthly reviews even one step further by looking at the performance of the content shared by your influencers.
Free Social Media Audit Tools to Crunch the Numbers
By just including your own handle in the “My Report” section of its dashboard, you’ll also be able to track your own Instagram account to get a better idea of your social presence. Plus, it will send you an email update that summarizes your activity every week that you can then use when you compile your monthly social media review. Just like with many of the social media tools that offer a free plan, HypeAuditor’s free plan is very limited and actually only meant to give you insight into how its software can help meet your requirements. However, the jump between its Free plan and cheapest plan is quite drastic – $399 to be exact. So, it’s not the most cost-effective solution for small businesses. Key features:
Engagement rate Audience quality score Growth rate Team access to reports
Pricing: Available upon request. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, White Label Reporting, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter For a more comprehensive overview of how your Instagram account is performing, you’ll need to sign up for its Growth plan that offers the Standard analytics. These will include details about your audience engagement, follower growth, and the number of clicks and visits to your Linkin.bio page. Not only will you be able to unlock much more detailed Instagram analytics with its Growth plan, but you’ll also get access to Pinterest analytics and click tracking as well as Twitter analytics and click tracking. With this extra data, you’ll get a better picture of how your pins and tweets are performing too. Key features:
Visual Instagram planner Hashtag suggestions Performance report
Pricing: While its Free plan does offer basic Instagram analytics, for a fuller picture it’s better to sign up for its Growth plan that costs $40 per month. Though for analysis of posting activity and information about when followers and viewers engage with the posts, you’ll need to sign up for one of its subscription plans. Also, sadly no TikTok analytics are included in its free plan. Key features:
Customized reports Hashtag analytics Follower demographics
Pricing: In addition to its Free plan, it also offers three subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at $59 per month. Key Features: Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Channels: Instagram, TikTok Even if you don’t need the ability to create reports, Buffer still offers a lot of value. Unlike some of the other tools on our list that focus on only a specific platform, Buffer offers one easy-to-use dashboard where you can keep tabs on the performance of your accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This way, you’ll get an overall understanding of how you are performing across various accounts, while also being able to access more in-depth insights about specific platforms. Buffer also takes it even one step further and includes the best times to post so that you can immediately start to improve your social media strategy. While Buffer does offer a free plan, you’ll need to sign up for Buffer Analytics to be able to access these types of in-depth insights. Key features:
Custom reports Audience demographics Boosted post insights Account analytics Stories analytics
Pricing: $5 per social channel per month for in-depth analytics. For an extra level of detail, it also offers advanced analytics that are available on request and can be added to its Essential plan at a cost. These include the ability to track your growth across organic and paid channels and follower demographics. Unlike many of the other tools that offer you access to only the last 30 days, ContentCal lets you analyze data over a period of up to 12 months. Another key feature that deserves an honourable mention is its customizable, branded reports. If you’re completing your social media audit to demonstrate your effectiveness to other team members, these reports will come in handy as you can automate it to be delivered straight to your inbox every month. Key features:
Advanced analytics Intuitive dashboard Competitor analysis Organic data for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Detailed follower analytics Paid media analytics Instagram Story analytics Top-performing post analysis Hashtag analysis
Pricing: ContentCal recently launched new packages and, sadly, retired its Free plan. Its cheapest plan starts at $37 per month and includes a free 14-day trial. To be able to access 30 days data that you can use for your monthly reviews, you’ll need to sign up for its Plus plan aimed at solopreneurs and small businesses. At less than $8 per month, it’s still great value for money compared to similar tools. What’s more, you can also use it for post analytics. At its higher subscription level, you’ll also unlock competitor analysis to give you a better idea of how your social media marketing stacks up against other companies in your niche. To help you make sense of how your posts are performing, it also offers custom report building. This feature can be quite useful if you’re working as part of a bigger team. Key features:
Analytics Content curation Bulk scheduling feature Custom reports Brand tracking
Pricing: It offers a Free plan and three subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at $7.48 per month. For advanced Instagram analytics and suggestions regarding post times based on when your target audience is the most active, you’ll need to sign up for its Solo plan. It costs less than $10 per month, so it can be a cost-effective tool if you mainly post on Instagram and Pinterest. Key features:
Basic analytics for Pinterest and Instagram Advanced analytics for Instagram Suggestions for best time to post
Pricing: It offers a Free plan and three subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at $11.25 per month. Key features:
Competitor analysis Account comparison for finding new influencers Social authority rankings Follower losses and gains
Pricing: In addition to its Free plan, it also offers two subscription plans: Target ($29 per month) and Multitask ($79 per month). Unlike most of the other tools on our list, SparkToro’s main focus is on audience intelligence and not so much post analytics. It can be especially useful for social media marketers who want to maximize reach and engagement as it helps you to identify which accounts reach your target audience. With this type of data, you’ll be able to prove which social accounts boast the most followers and best engagement. Key features:
Audience intelligence for social accounts, websites, podcasts, and YouTube Text insights Demographics
Pricing: It offers a Free plan and three subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at $38 per month. While it doesn’t offer a free plan per se, it does have three free tools: Twitter Assistant, Twitter Snapshot Report, and Instagram Account Checkup. The Twitter Assistant, in particular, is very useful. It looks at your recent tweets to offer customized suggestions for how you can boost engagement and get more followers. All in all, it’s one of the best free tools to use if you’re looking for new ideas on how you can get more from Twitter. Key features:
Reporting on your Twitter performance Top contributor identification Measuring potential reach and impressions Hashtag analysis
Pricing: Pricing starts at $49 per month. Plus, as social media marketing is really about your target audience, it also offers comprehensive insights on your audience demographics. Key features:
Detailed reports Instagram Stories analytics Detailed insights on demographics
Pricing: In addition to its Free plan, it offers two subscription plans. The cheapest plan starts at €9.90 per month. Included in Klear’s list of features are a free Facebook page analytics tool and a tool for performing a quick Twitter analysis. For example, with the Twitter analysis tool you can get a better understanding of your followers and how authentic your influence is. Alternatively, if you don’t want to sign up for Klear, you can use it to create a free social media report. All you need to do is enter your brand name and contact details like email, name, and phone number and it will generate a PDF report for you. Though, it’s not instant and you’ll have to wait a day or two for your report. Key features:
Influencer analytics Data-driven campaign reports Real-time notifications whenever new content gets published
Pricing: Pricing is available upon request. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs As it’s a social media analytics tool, it can also quickly combine all your metrics and keep them updated conveniently in one place. To help you, their template lists all the recommended metrics that you should track to make sense of how your profiles are performing. Notes about where to find each metric in Sprout Social are also included. One useful feature that Sprout Social has is that it can highlight which posts have performed the best and measure hashtag performance across profiles. So, it makes it easy to get a quick overview of which type of content your audience resonates with better. Armed with this knowledge, you’re much better equipped to plan your social media calendar for the coming months. Not only does Sprout Social help you to zoom in on your social media platforms, but it also helps you to link your social followers to your web traffic. After all, one of the main goals of social media marketing is to generate more website traffic. Key features:
Profiles, keywords, and locations monitoring Group, profile, and post-level reporting Competitive reports for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Response rate and time analysis reports Trend analysis for Twitter hashtags and keywords Paid social reporting
Pricing: After a free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $99 per month. It also includes a free ROI calculator that you can use to compare what you’ve invested into your social media marketing and what results this investment has delivered (like sales, followers, and conversions). Other useful tools for social media auditing include all-in-one audience reporting in Hootsuite Insights and their free, ready-to-use social media audit template. Key features:
Multiple social media accounts management in one place with one password Custom analytics Hootsuite Impact for measuring your ROI from paid and organic social media
Pricing: After a free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $49 per month. It also includes a limited Free plan. Another useful feature is that it can help you to identify backlinks to your content. With the help of their backlink checker, you can uncover any backlink spam which can hurt your online rep. It also includes social media monitoring to keep track of brand mentions on social media. Key features:
Content analysis reports Domain reports Facebook Page Analyzer
Pricing: After a free 30-day trial, pricing starts at $99 per month. It also includes a Free plan.
