Social Media Audit: How Do You Stack Up Against Your Competitors?

How to Carry Out a Competitor Social Media Audit

With one eye on plans for 2024, assessing opportunities to get ahead of the competition is crucial.

To help do this effectively, it’s important to monitor what the rest of the market is up to, what's working for them, and how you can make tweaks to your own social media strategy.

And this is where a competitor social media audit comes into play.

In this blog, we'll guide you through a simple 3-step process of conducting an audit, ensuring you capture valuable insights and can identify ways to improve your own social media efforts, whilst being more in-the-know on how your competitors are faring.

1) What should a social media audit involve?

In a nutshell, this is primary research of your competitors, diving into their social channels to nose around what is and isn’t working for them.

You should review all the channels they are posting on, noting down key things such as:

• Number of followers
• Frequency of posting
• What content is being posted (themes and core messages)
• Are their posts gaining engagement (likes, comments, plays etc.)
• What posts are performing the best
• Is it clear what the purpose of their channel is (i.e customer service, or to educate, or purely to entertain etc.)

2) Identifying what your research tells you

Undertaking an audit is as much about critiquing your own activities to help find areas for improvement, as it is looking into and comparing with what your competitors are doing.

It’ll soon become clear what key messages and topics your competitors are covering, and you’ll get a feel for who’s platforms are performing really well, and are likely to be building a strong social community as a result.

You’ll be able to establish strengths and weaknesses from your competitor research. Specific aspects will start to stand out, for example are they using hashtags, location tagging; efficacy of working with influencers; intermittent / irregular posting schedule; giveaways proving very popular etc.

To support the qualitative findings and to conclude the research, we recommend a scoring system that helps to quantify things.

With a score out of five (or ten) for each of your competitors, you can benchmark how your social presence compares, as well as identifying where the opportunities lie.


3) Track all your findings in a social media audit template
Once you get into a rhythm with your research and analysis, you will want to present back your findings to your team in a succinct way.

And it’s a lot easier to work with a pre-made template (that you can adapt as you see fit) to document all your research.

Download your free social media audit template >

Happy social media auditing, guys!

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If you'd like support with your social strategy for 2024, and are interested in finding ways to elevate your social media efforts, then look no further. We've put together fluff-free content strategy playbook that you can download for free. Visit this page to grab a copy.

And if you're interested in finding out more about how we could help you enhance brand awareness across social media, then book a discovery call today. We'll use this time to chat through ways we can add value to your business with a stronger social media presence for the year ahead, getting you even closer to your target audience.