Most documents labelled “social media audit” are inventories. Follower counts, posting frequency, engagement rates, a chart of best-performing posts. That is a description of activity, and activity is the least interesting thing about a social presence.

A real audit answers a harder question: is this presence doing anything for the business, and what is being said about you in the places you do not control?

The two halves

A complete audit has an owned half and an unowned half, and the second is where the value concentrates.

The owned half

Your accounts, your posts, your engagement. What matters here is not volume but coherence:

  • Positioning consistency. Does the account describe the same company your website describes?
  • Audience fit. Are the followers the people who buy, or an audience accumulated by accident?
  • Response behaviour. What happens when someone asks a question, or complains? Latency and tone here are read by prospects as a proxy for support quality.
  • Signal of life. An abandoned account is worse than no account, for the reasons covered in what buyers check before they trust you.

The unowned half

Everywhere else your name appears: review sites, community threads, competitors' comment sections, trade forums, subreddits, Q&A sites.

This half is harder to gather and far more honest, because nobody is performing for you. It is where you find out what customers say when they are not talking to you. We cover the method in listening where you don't own the channel.

Why the unowned half matters more

Three reasons.

It is what buyers see. A prospect researching you reads the forum thread, not your feed. Their impression is formed largely from material you did not write.

It is unfiltered. People are markedly more candid in a community thread than in a review form or a survey response, and considerably more candid than in a conversation with your team.

It contains the objections. The specific reasons people hesitate, in their own words, are sitting in public threads. That vocabulary is directly usable in positioning and in objection handling.

Choosing what to look at

A fixed checklist of platforms produces bad audits. The platforms that matter depend entirely on the category.

A B2B software company's real conversation may happen in a handful of specialist communities and on review sites, with its own social accounts nearly irrelevant. A consumer brand may live and die on visual platforms. An industrial supplier may have almost no social footprint but a substantial presence in trade forums and procurement discussions.

Auditing an industrial supplier against a consumer-brand checklist produces a report full of failures that do not matter. See choosing platforms by category, not by checklist.

What the output should contain

A useful audit produces:

  • A platform-by-platform read of what each channel is actually doing, including channels you should stop investing in.
  • Verbatim quotes from real customers, each linked to its source. Paraphrase loses the thing that makes this valuable — see what customers say vs what they rate.
  • Recurring themes with an indication of how often each appears, so a one-off complaint is not mistaken for a pattern.
  • Competitor comparison on the same axes, because “low engagement” means nothing without knowing what normal looks like in your category.
  • A short list of actions tied to those findings.

The metrics that mislead

Worth naming, because they dominate most audits:

  • Follower count. Purchasable, inheritable, and uncorrelated with revenue in most B2B categories.
  • Engagement rate in isolation. A tiny account with engaged followers can post a high rate and reach nobody who matters.
  • Posting frequency. A cost, not an outcome.
  • Aggregate sentiment scores. A single number that compresses away the specific complaint you needed to read.

None are useless. All are misleading as headline numbers, because they measure the presence rather than its effect.

How often to run one

Annually for the full exercise, with lighter checks quarterly. The unowned half moves faster than the owned half — a product change or a support failure can shift community sentiment inside a month, and you will not learn about it from your own feed.

Our Social Media Audit covers both halves, with every quote linked to its source and platforms chosen by category rather than from a fixed checklist. It ships in three editions — B2B software, B2B non-software, and B2C — because the audit that is useful differs sharply between them.