How to do a Facebook audit in 30 minutes or less

When was the last time you looked at your Facebook Page’s settings? A month? A year? Whenever you first set up your Page?

Facebook is constantly adding and removing features for businesses. Spending half an hour or less to complete an annual Facebook audit will ensure you’re still on-brand despite all the changes happening on the platform. A social media audit will also surface branding issues and will give you a good idea of what areas you’ll need to work on when it comes to your Facebook marketing strategy.

The Facebook audit is divided into four parts:

1. Profile and branding
2. Content and audience
3. Advertising
4. Strategy

Open up your Facebook Page and get ready for the audit!

1. Facebook profile and branding audit

In this part, we take a look at your profile. When someone visits your Page for the first time, you want them to be able to find all the necessary information. Looking at your profile and branding is all about that first impression.

Profile completion

The very first step of the audit is to look at your profile page as a visitor. Observe this both while logged into Facebook and in a private browser window. Facebook changes its views and features often so you’ll want to make sure you see the profile from all of the viewpoints available to you.

When you’re logged into Facebook and looking at your profile, there’s a toggle to the right where you can choose which account to interact with. Choosing your personal profile provides a view that is shown to logged-in Facebook users.

To demonstrate this, we’ll use Bloomscape as an example. The light background shows what people see if they’re not logged into Facebook while the dark background appears to users who are logged in. As you can see below, the arrangement of tabs and content is different between the two.

Once you’ve reviewed your profile, head to the Settings menu. Working your way from top to bottom, click through each setting menu tab to ensure all the necessary fields are completed.

CTA button, links and custom username

Go back to your profile page and look at your CTA button located on the bottom-right corner of your cover photo. Make sure that the CTA is still accurate with a working link or change it to a new action.

Now click on your About tab and make sure all the links and contact info is still accurate. Customers visit the About tab to learn more about your company and check your hours. Keeping your info updated prevents the inevitable complaint of “But your Facebook Page said you were open at this time!”

SEO check and verification

If you think that what you write into your Page doesn’t matter, think again. Run a brand name search on Google to see what shows up. Continuing with Bloomscape as an example, after Googling their brand name, the first page of the search results features their social media profiles from their Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Additionally, If the option is available to you, complete the verification process in Business Manager to have a blue checkmark next to your profile name and assure customers that they’re on the right brand Page and not a copycat.

Cover photo and profile photo

In the two areas where media shows up prominently on your profile, it’s important to put your best branding foot forward. The profile photo is usually where your logo goes. It should be a simple version so that it’s recognizable in all formats.

Your cover photo doesn’t need to be static. Videos are a fun way to introduce your company and be eye-catching. The dimensions must be at least 400 x 150 pixels. These dimensions vary between desktop and mobile views so be sure to check that both views look appropriate.

On Sprout Social’s Facebook Page below, the logo is the profile photo and the cover photo is on-brand.

Customer service

When 80% of customers expect companies to interact with them on social media, it’s best to lay out customer care tools that they will find helpful. In the Page settings menu, you’ll find Messaging Settings. This is where you set up things like a greeting and your Messenger URL.

If you want to explore further, go to your Business Suite Inbox to set up automated responses and Away messages. With an active Facebook Page, you can use a service like Sprout’s customer care solutions to manage comments, reviews and messages all in one place.

Tips

• Build your Facebook business Page to attract customers.
• Understand how SEO matters in social media.
• Optimize your Facebook cover photo with the best dimensions and file types

2. Facebook content and audience audit

In this second part of the Facebook audit, we look at what your general content looks like and if it’s serving the right audience for you. Be sure to look at all the Facebook features such as Stories and Live for the most comprehensive audit.

Overall color and feel

Scroll through your Facebook profile page to get an idea of your brand’s visual presence on the platform. For the posts that contain media like photos and videos, ask yourself if they’re on brand. Do the right brand colors stand out? Is there a cohesive feel to the posts?

Image sizing and optimization

We mentioned earlier about optimizing your cover photo. Now it’s time to look at your posts. Optimizing your images for Facebook means that they’ll display well no matter what device your audience is using. Check out the always up-to-date guide for the latest Facebook specs.

Serving the right audience

In Facebook Insights you can see your audience’s demographic data. Knowing who makes up your audience helps you figure out if it matches your target audience. Sometimes, the two are different. If your marketing strategy aims to reach one target audience but data on your Facebook Insights is different, then there’s an issue.

Captions

Let’s move on to the written portion of your posts. What you write in those first few lines is what grabs your audience’s attention. You can utilize different post ideas to help your audience stay engaged and interested.

In this fun post, Oreo keeps the caption simple but effective. The image might catch your eye first but the caption makes you stop and search for the four cookies that are different.

Hashtags and tagging

Look at your posts again and this time around, observe your use of Facebook hashtags and tagged Pages. The hashtags should be relevant and limited. No one wants to read a post where #every #word #is #tagged.

And when you’re mentioning other brands, tag them so they see the post and engage with it. It creates social goodwill between brands and encourages post engagement.

Tips

• Check your profile for visual brand cohesiveness
• Don’t limit yourself to only posts. Take advantage of the different post types and features that Facebook offers.
• Check your audience demographic to measure brand awareness

3. Facebook ads audit

If you don’t run Facebook ads but want to, skip to the takeaways section for helpful links. Running ads can be overwhelming. Use this audit time to examine how your ads are performing overall.

Performance review

Benchmarking your Facebook ad performance will depend on your industry and campaign objective. These metrics provide information for calculating your Facebook advertising cost and ROI.

Run a search for your most recent ads or use Sprout’s Facebook and Instagram Paid Performance Report in the Performance review section. You can compare these to your industry benchmarks and see how you match up. Companies want to keep their costs low. Looking at metrics like CPC and CPM will tell you if your ads are performing well.

Another campaign portion to look at is the objectives section. Are you using the right objectives to fit your advertising goals? Choosing the wrong objectives may be costly if you don’t catch the mistake early on.

Creatives

Spend enough time on Facebook and you’ve probably seen the same ad from the same brand multiple times. In fact, you might even take action to hide these ads. During this audit, examine your current creatives. Take note of campaigns that are running too long, especially if engagement drops by the month which means users are losing interest. Repeated ads make for bored customers, which lead to higher advertising costs.

And while we’re here, check that your ad sizes and specs are optimized for the placements you chose. An ad that crops out your product won’t be very effective.

Accurate targeting and audiences

If you’ve got your ads set up with the best creatives, you want them to reach the right people. Look into your targeting details and see if the target audience is the one seeing and engaging with the ad. If the ads aren’t reaching the right people, then you need to learn how to use ad targeting.

Creating different audiences helps spread brand awareness and avoids the same people seeing the same ads. The lookalike audience is what you want for finding people similar to your existing audiences.

Tips

• Use this foolproof method to create your Facebook ad strategy
• Don’t let your ads become stale. Get inspired by these ad campaigns.
• Are you targeting the same audience too often? Use lookalike audiences in your next ad campaign.

4. Facebook strategy audit

We’re in the final stretch of the Facebook audit and it’s an important one. Without an effective Facebook marketing strategy, your resources are not being used wisely. This is where more detailed metrics come into play.

Scheduling

According to Sprout’s data, the best times to post on Facebook are on Mondays through Thursdays between 8a.m. and 1 p.m., generally. This is an aggregated data set so your best times may vary from the graphic below.

Look at your post-level data to see if specific days and times are garnering more engagement than others. Take note if your current schedule does not optimally match up. Posting at the right time for your brand will give you the highest engagement rate, which leads us to the next part of the Facebook audit.

Engagement

At the post level, you’ll need to review what your engagement rate is like and how your target audience is engaging. Perhaps some posts have more comments than others. Is there a correlation between your most commented posts? This is an indication that you should continue with this part of the strategy.

Sprout’s Facebook Reports in the Engagement section provides you with easy-to-read charts so you know exactly what your engagement level is like.

The other part of engagement is how you’re interacting with others. Are you answering questions in the comments? Do you comment on other brands’ posts?

Influencers

Using influencers as part of your overall marketing strategy is common for brands. At a glance, are the influencers you’re currently working with still useful to your brand? Do they align with your values? Have they been great to work with?

See if conducting an audit on your influencer strategy will identify if you are reaching your target goals and if there are ways you can improve upon it. It may take some time but finding the right influencers for your brand can result in a mutually beneficial relationship that will benefit your bottom line.

Goal alignment

Every strategy needs some goals to measure its success. In this final portion of the audit, see if your current Facebook strategy matches up with your social media goals. If this year’s goal are to increase brand awareness, then your posts and analytics should reflect that.

Takeaway

• Use Sprout’s ViralPost scheduling feature to publish at optimal times.
• Track the right metrics for your goals in your analytics.
• Is your engagement falling? Use these strategies to increase engagement.

Conclusion

And we’re done! Congratulations on completing your Facebook audit. The audit may have surfaced some issues. This is when you create an action plan to fix errors or improve on your strategy. The four-part Facebook audit should be performed on at least an annual basis.

If you found the audit useful, check out our other audit articles:

• How to Perform a Social Media Audit (Free Template Included)
• How to do an Instagram audit that improves your performance
• The 20 Minute Twitter Audit