Before paying anyone to run your social media, spend an afternoon looking at what you have. You will learn what is working, what is not, and what you actually need help with. You will also be able to tell whether an agency's audit is thorough or just a template with your name on it.
1. Positioning: can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds?
Open each profile in a private window, as if you had never heard of yourself. Read the name, the bio and the first nine posts. Then write down, in one sentence, who this account is for and what it offers. If you cannot, a new visitor cannot either.
2. Content: sort the last month by what it did
List your last thirty posts and sort them into groups by theme or format. For each group, note what it led to: replies, saves, profile visits, link clicks, sign-ups. Do not rank them by likes alone. Likes are the cheapest reaction to give and the weakest signal of interest.
- Which group produced the actions you actually want?
- Which group do you spend the most time on, and does it deserve that time?
- What have you not tried that your audience keeps asking about?
3. Audience: who is actually there?
Look at the platform's audience information, if you have access to it: where followers are, how old they are, when they are active. Then compare that to the people you want to reach. A large audience in the wrong country, or of the wrong kind, is worth far less than it looks. Also skim your recent followers and commenters for signs of automated accounts.
4. The path from post to sale
This is the part most accounts skip. Follow the route a viewer would take, as a viewer: from a post, to your profile, to the link, to the page it opens, to the thing you want them to do.
- Is there a clear link, and does it load quickly on a phone?
- Does the page match what the post promised?
- Is the next step obvious, and is it a single step?
- Is there somewhere for someone who is not ready to buy to leave an email address?
5. Tracking: can you tell what is working?
Check that links are tracked so you can see which platform and which post sent each visit, and that your site records the outcomes you care about. If advertising has ever been run, check that the account's tracking was set up properly, because ads without good tracking waste money in ways you cannot see.
6. Accounts and access: who controls what?
Write down every account, who owns it, who has admin access, and where the logins live. Pages and ad accounts should belong to you, with others added as collaborators, never the other way round. This is easy to fix now and painful to discover later.
How to use it when you talk to an agency
Share your findings and ask for theirs. A careful agency will confirm, correct or add to what you found, and will point at specifics. If their audit tells you nothing you could not have written yourself from a template, that tells you something about how they will work.