A social media audit is one hour spent finding out whether the channels you post on actually send people to your shop. You do not need a paid tool for it. You open the analytics already inside your own accounts, set everything to the last 90 days, and answer six questions per channel. At the end, you keep the channel that earns its hours, fix one thing on the channel that nearly works, and stop posting on the one that has never sent you a buyer. Here is the whole process.
Why most social media audits waste an afternoon
Search for this and you will find checklists with forty items on them. Check your bio. Check your highlight covers. Check your posting times. Check your hashtags.
They measure everything and decide nothing. You get to the end, you have forty ticks and no answer, and next week you are posting exactly the same way on exactly the same three channels.
An audit that does not end in a decision is not an audit. It is homework.
So this one has one question behind every step: does this channel send people to my shop? Six checks, a score, and one of three answers per channel—keep it, fix one thing, or stop.
What you need before you start
- The free analytics inside your accounts: Instagram Insights, Meta Business Suite for a Facebook Page, Pinterest Analytics.
- Your shop or website stats. On Etsy that is Shop Manager, then Stats. On your own site it is Google Analytics.
- About an hour.
One rule that decides whether any of this works: set every screen to the last 90 days. Not 7 days, not 28. Ninety, everywhere.
Short windows lie. One good week makes a dead channel look alive, and one quiet week makes a good channel look broken. Pinterest needs the long window most of all, because a pin you made in spring can start sending clicks in autumn.
Step 1. Pick the one number
Most people measure social media with followers. Followers do not pay you. A shop with 400 followers who click beats a shop with 12,000 who scroll past.
So pick one number, and judge every channel by it. For a shop, it is almost always this one: clicks to your shop or website.
Write down where that number stands today. Everything below is measured against it.
Step 2. Start with your shop, not with the apps
This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the one that changes minds.
Your social apps tell you how many people saw a post. Only your shop knows how many arrived. Those two numbers are never the same, and your shop is the honest one.
- Etsy: Shop Manager, then Stats. Set the last 90 days, then open Traffic sources.
- Your own site: Google Analytics, then Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. Set the last 90 days.
Write down two things. Your total visits from everywhere, and one line per channel.
Instagram can show up as instagram, l.instagram.com, or ig. Facebook can show up as facebook, m.facebook.com, l.facebook.com, or lm.facebook.com. Add them together.
If a channel is not in the list at all, write 0. That is not the tool failing. That is the answer you came for.
Now score what you found. This is the first of your six checks.
Work out what share of your total each channel sent you. A quarter or more of everything scores 2. Ten clicks or more, but less than a quarter, scores 1. Under ten clicks in 90 days scores 0.
This is the only check your shop can confirm, which makes it worth more than the five that follow.
Step 3. The 5-second profile test
Open your profile the way a stranger sees it. Log out if you can, or borrow somebody else’s phone. Look at the top of the screen only. Do not scroll.
Set a timer for 5 seconds. Look, then look away. Now answer three things:
- What does this person sell?
- Who is it for?
- Where do I click to buy?
Three out of three is a pass. Two is a warning. One or none, and the problem is not your posting—it is that nobody who lands on you knows what you do.
Five seconds is not unfair. It is longer than most people give you.
Step 4. Your top nine posts
Open your analytics and sort the last 90 days by saves on Instagram, by link clicks on a Facebook Page, and by outbound clicks on Pinterest.
Ignore likes. A like costs nothing and predicts nothing. A save, a share, or an outbound click is somebody choosing to keep you.
Write the top nine down on paper. Then look for what they share. Same format? Same subject? Same kind of first line? Same time of day?
This is the most useful thing on the page, and it costs nothing. A pattern you already own beats advice from any stranger, including me.
Two questions to answer honestly: can you see a pattern at all, and are you still posting that way today? Most people can see it and stop—because the post that works is usually the plainest one, and you got bored of it long before your buyers did.
Step 5. What your hours actually cost
Here is the check nobody runs, and it is the one that gives you your week back.
Add up everything you spend on a channel in a normal week: making the images, writing the captions, posting, replying, and the scrolling you call research. Most people guess low. Guess high, then take an hour off, and you will be close.
Then do this:
- Weekly hours times 13. That is your hours in 90 days.
- Multiply by what an hour of your time is worth. If you would pay somebody $15 an hour to do this, use $15.
- Divide by the clicks that channel sent your shop. That is the price of one click.
An example. Two hours a week is 26 hours in 90 days. At $15 an hour, that is $390. If the channel sent 40 clicks, each one cost you $9.75 of your own evening.
Now ask yourself plainly whether you would buy those clicks at that price. Most people would not, and most people have never once done this arithmetic.
Step 6. The link path test
Do this on a phone. Your buyers are on a phone.
Open your own profile, tap your link the way a buyer would, and keep tapping until you reach a working buy button. Count the taps. A link page with many buttons counts as one tap.
Two taps is good. Three is a warning. Four or more, or a link that lands on something that does not match the post, is a leak.
Old posts and old pins pointing at products you no longer sell are the most common leak of all. If you have been selling for more than a year, you almost certainly have one.
Step 7. Your content mix
Look at your last 12 posts and put each one in a single bucket. If a post fits two, pick the one it does best.
- Sells. Names the product and asks for the click.
- Teaches. Gives one useful thing they can use today.
- Shows. Behind the scenes—the making, the packing, the shop.
- Talks. Asks a question, answers one, replies to people.
Every bucket should have something in it. All selling and people stop looking. No selling and people never learn you have a shop at all. Both are common, and both are fixable in a week.
How to turn six answers into a decision
Score each check 0, 1, or 2. Two when it clearly passes, one when it half passes, zero when it fails. That gives every channel a score out of 12.
- 9 to 12—keep it. This channel works. Do not redesign it. Go back to your top nine posts and make more of exactly that.
- 5 to 8—fix one thing. Take your lowest-scoring check and fix only that, for 30 days. Change nothing else, or you will not know what worked.
- 0 to 4—stop posting there. The hours are going out, and nothing is coming back.
Do them in that order, but do the stopping first. Stopping hands you back the hours that the fixing needs.
What if the audit tells you to stop?
Then stop. That is allowed, and it is the most valuable thing an audit can tell you.
It does not mean deleting your account. Leave the profile up with a good bio and a working link, because people will still find it, and it costs you nothing to be found. Just stop making new posts there.
Wait 60 days, then look at your one number again. If nothing got worse, you have your answer and you have your hours back. If your clicks dipped, you have learned the channel was quietly working, and you can start again knowing exactly why you are there.
One channel done properly beats three done at 40 percent. If two of yours scored under 5 and one scored above 9, the decision has already been made for you.
One thing this audit cannot tell you is whether the clicks are turning into sales. If a channel is sending people and still nothing sells, the problem is after the click, not before it. For an Etsy shop, I wrote about that separately in Etsy Views But No Sales.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I do a social media audit?
Twice a year is plenty, plus once whenever a channel starts to feel like a chore. Any more often and you are measuring instead of posting.
Does this work if I only run one channel?
Yes, and it is worth doing. A single channel can be the problem just as easily as three. The six checks are the same.
What about TikTok, YouTube, or LinkedIn?
The six checks work on any platform. Only two things change: where the analytics live, and what counts as a save. Everything else—the profile test, the hours math, the link path, the mix—is identical.
Do I need Google Analytics?
Not if you sell on Etsy. Shop Manager has the traffic numbers you need. If you sell on your own website, Google Analytics is where those numbers live.
Do it tonight, not on the weekend
The weekend never comes. This takes an hour, and it is the only hour of social media work this month that is guaranteed to give you time back instead of taking more.
If you would rather not do the arithmetic and the scoring by hand, I built it as a tool. You type your numbers in, it scores every channel out of 12, and it tells you which one to keep, which one to fix, and which one to stop. It comes with a 17-page guide that shows you where every number lives, screen by screen. You will find it here: Social Media Audit for Small Business.
Either way, run it. An hour now is worth more than another three months of guessing.