A step-by-step guide to auditing owned social for a large business

Whether your organization has 3 or 300 social media accounts, it is crucial to know what you’re working with. By auditing your social media accounts, you can take stock of all your accounts, the admins managing them, and ensure that there aren’t any fraudulent accounts parading as your organization.

Audits are irreplaceable documents to have on hand as you evaluate the efficacy of your current communications strategy, line out the next iteration of your strategy, and check you have the right people enacting those iterations.

So what should be in an audit? When we conduct our audits for clients, we do the following: list all accounts, report fraudulent accounts, confirm the roles of known account admins, decide grading metrics based on the client’s broader goals, grade all accounts, make recommendations, share feedback with the account admins. 

Here is the how-to’s for each step in the process:

List all known accounts

Pretty simple–list all your known accounts in a spreadsheet! You should think ahead to the best ways to sort them and what info to include, like follower count, platform, perhaps organizational regions, and any other categories that you would like to track for your own goals. 

Do searches on all platforms, even ones you’re not on

Search your group name, regional names, and any associated names on all major social media platforms–even platforms that your group isn’t on. Add legitimate accounts to your spreadsheet, and note down any fraudulent accounts.

Report fraudulent accounts

Make sure to report fraudulent accounts in the most efficient way possible. If you have a platform representative, reach out to them to have the fraudulent accounts removed. If not, report the accounts natively through the platform. Keep track of if these accounts are fully deleted.

Reach out to all account admins to confirm they are still in that role

Reach out internally to the known admins of the accounts to confirm that they are still in that role. If there are any unknown admins, work internally to find who they are. If you are not able to find out who manages the account, or the account has been dormant for too long, follow platform protocol to recover the account.

Decide what metrics on which to grade accounts based on your goals

Based on your social media goals, decide how to grade your accounts.Typically, we look at content quality, cadence of posting, and engagement quality. On our scale, we give them a score 1-3 for each category, and then average them all to get our end score. You can also weigh the categories to allow for more flexibility. For example, engagement quality can be weighted less than content quality if engagement is less important to your organization.

Grade, analyze, use

Once you have your scale, grade the accounts and finalize the averages. With your scores added to your spreadsheet, you can now analyze the data. With the handy categories you created earlier, you can cut and sort the data however you would like, and use the data to iterate your strategy, give suggestions to channel managers, and to refer back to throughout the year for information about accounts and account owners. 

While channel audits can be a lot of work, we recommend conducting the audit yearly to keep your information up to date and inform your annual strategy.