How to conduct a speedy social media audit

Is your brand overdue for a social media audit? If your social media strategy isn’t data-driven, goal-oriented and rooted in intentional decisions, it’s time for an audit.

The problem? So many brands freestyle their social presence without a plan. Some teams inherited an account with no documentation. Others haven’t had time to step back and assess. Whatever the situation, a social media audit is the fastest path from guesswork to a strategy that drives real results.

This guide shows you how to run a social media audit quickly and effectively. You’ll get an 11-step process, actionable tips, a free downloadable template and a walkthrough of how to use Sprout Social to make every audit faster.

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit is a comprehensive review of your brand’s social media presence across all active platforms, covering profile information, content performance, audience demographics, engagement metrics and competitive positioning. Social media managers, marketing teams and agencies use audits to identify what’s working, fix what isn’t and align their social strategy with measurable business goals. Most brands run one quarterly, with lighter check-ins monthly for high-volume publishing teams.

What are the benefits of a social media audit?

Aa0thorough social media audit delivers four measurable outcomes:

• Gain a clear understanding of your current performance: An audit provides a snapshot of your key social media metricslike engagement rates, reach and audience growthgiving you a data-driven foundation for decision-making.

• Identify areas where you can improve your strategy: An audit analyzes your content performance, audience demographics and competitor activity to reveal what’s working and where to optimize your approach.

• Ensure your social efforts are aligned with your business goals: An audit supports your assessment of which social media activities are contributing to your overarching objectives, whether that’s driving website traffic, generating leads or boosting brand awareness.

• Uncover new opportunities for growth: An audit reveals untapped potential in your social presence, such as new audience segments to target or emerging platforms to explore.

How to perform a social media audit in 11 simple steps

If you’re scrambling to figure out how to start a social media audit, don’t sweat it! There’s a lot to cover, but putting in the work now will save you serious time later.

Below we’ve broken down the step-by-step process for your first audit.

Or, download our free social media audit template and plug in your numbers. If you’re already using Sprout Social, your key audit metrics are available in one place, and no manual data-pulling is required.

1. Take inventory of active and inactive social profiles

First things first: Take inventory of your social profiles. No-brainer, right? But don’t just think about the ‘big’ platforms like Instagram or Facebook. What about that YouTube channel with two subscribers? Or the Pinterest profile you haven’t touched in three years?

Yep, those count. You don’t need to agonize over networks you’re not actively using, but it’s important to double-check that you’ve claimed those accounts and that they’re under your company’s control.

Sprouta0Social’s social media audit template has tabs for all the major networks, and you can easily add more for any others you use. There’s also space in the summary tab to list every active (and inactive) profile in one place.

With your profiles accounted for, it’s time to define your priorities. These are where you’ll focus ona0building your social presence. You’ll be surprised which platforms are gaining the most traction.

2. Define specific goals for each network

Next, define clear goals for each active network. The metrics you track during your audit should map directly to these objectives:

Goal	Key metrics to track
Increase brand awareness	Impressions, reach, follower growth, share of voice
Generate leads and sales	Link clicks, profile visits, conversion rate, referral traffic
Increase community engagement	Comments, replies, saves, DMs, engagement rate
Grow your audience	Net new followers, audience growth rate, follower quality
Drive website traffic	Link clicks, referral sessions, landing page performance

Connecting your social media goals with your overall business objectives is crucial, but don’t overlook your audience’s behavior.

For example, if your leadership team wants to see more audience growth on TikTok, but users mainly discover your brand through their For You Page, why not focus on maximizing views instead? This approach aligns with how your audience interacts with your content. Plus, you’ll have data from your audit to support your strategy.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to fill in every single blank during your first social media audit. Focus on the social media metrics that reflect your goals.

3. Make sure your branding, language and identity are consistent

Inconsistent branding erodes audience trust faster than you’d expect. When auditing your presence, check every profile against your brand identity standardspay close attention to:

• Bio and “About” language (when in doubt, refer to your style guide)

• Profile and banner images

• Destination URLs and landing pages

• Hashtags

If you don’t run many social-specific campaigns, chances are you won’t have many updates to make. But for brands with seasonal campaigns, regular check-ups are crucial. For example, you don’t want to use holiday-themed creatives in mid-March.

4. Open up your social media analytics

Time to dive into the data. With your profiles prepped and ready, now’s the moment to see how they’re really performing. Are you hitting your targets? Where is there room for improvement? A social media analytics tool like Sprout Social supports you in quickly pulling the metrics you need to get the full picture.

Sprouta0Social’s Cross-Platform Profile Performance Report aggregates key analytics from all your social media platformsFacebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTokfor a well-defined understanding of how your platforms compare.

Not using Sprouta0Social yet? No problem. You can still use Sprouta0Social’s handy audit template to determine which metrics to track, including engagement, link clicks, shares, referral traffic, impressions and more.

After gathering your data, you’ll be able to identify your top-performing platforms and prioritize your efforts. If you consistently track your social media performance, this step will be even more insightful.

5. Identify your top-performing social media posts

Want to know the secret to creating content your audience truly loves? Look closely at individual post performance. Native social media analytics tools are a goldmine of insights into what resonates best.

For each network, analyze your content’s performance across key metrics, including:

• Impressions (or views)

• Engagements (comments, likes and saves)

• Reach

If sorting posts by engagement feels tedious, Sprout Social can help. The Post Performance Report ranks your top-performing posts over any time period, so you can see which content your audience prefers.

The audit template includes sections for measuring the performance of your overall publishing strategy and individual posts. If you want to go more granular, try categorizing top posts based on category, such as:

• Video

• Promotional

• Educational/informational

• Entertainment

• Rich media (images and GIFs)

This will give you a clear picture of what’s working well on each platform. From there, it’s a matter of fitting more of that content into next month’s social media calendar.

6. Benchmark your performance against competitors

Knowing how your content performs in isolation is valuable. Knowing how it performs against your competitors is what turns an audit into a competitive advantage.

Competitive benchmarking transforms your audit from an internal scorecard into market intelligence, answering the questions your leadership team is already asking about growth, engagement and content strategy. During your audit, pull Competitor Performance data and look for patterns across these areas:

• Audience growth rate: Are competitors gaining followers faster than you on specific platforms? That’s a signal about where attention is shifting.

• Engagement benchmarks: A high follower count means little if engagement is flat. Compare engagement rates by platform and content type to find the gaps.

• Content themes and posting frequency: What topics drive their highest-performing posts? How often are they publishing? Use these signals to stress-test your own strategy.

• Share of voice: How much of the conversation in your category does your brand own vs. competitors?

Sprout Social’s Competitor Performance Report gives you a side-by-side view of your social presence versus industry peers, so you can benchmark against others in your industry without manual research. Use the data to identify where you’re leading and where there are opportunities your competitors haven’t captured yet.

For an even deeper competitive signal, use Sprout Social’s social listening tools to track competitor mentions, sentiment trends and share of voice in real timenot just at audit time.

7. Figure out how you’re funneling your social media traffic

Your social media presence shouldn’t operate in isolation. It’s essential to understand how your efforts are driving traffic to your website and generating leads. That means figuring out which posts are sparking genuine interest and which platforms are your top performers.

Bonus points if you already have Google Analytics set up to track marketing across channels. Look under Acquisition and filter by Social to see which networks are sending traffic your waya0and which are underperforming.

Alternatively, you can use Sprout Social to find the correlation between your social media followers and website traffic for a better understanding of your social media’s broader impact on audience behavior.

8. Dig into demographic data

What you post and how you say it depends on who’s actually seeing it. Messaging for Gen Z and millennials versus Gen X is a completely different creative exerciseand your audit is where you confirm whether you’re reaching the right people.

During your audit, pull demographic data for each active platform and check for these signals:

• Age range: Does your audience age bracket match your target customer profile? A mismatch signals a content or platform strategy issue.

• Location: Are you reaching the right geographic markets? International brands should check for regional performance gaps.

• Gender breakdown: Compare audience gender split to your buyer persona data to confirm alignment.

• Active times: When is your audience online? Use this to inform your publishing schedule going forward.

If your audit reveals a demographic mismatch, use that data to advocate for a content pivot because it’s far more persuasive to leadership than gut instinct.

9. Assess opportunities from new social media platforms

Social media fragmentation is real. Every year comes with a new set of trending platforms. Of course, not all of them stick around. But being an early adopter of a social media platform is enticing.

Think about how TikTok exploded after being dismissed as a secondary network. Likewise, look at all of the buzz around Threads or evenBlueSky. It pays to keep an open mind. In your social media audit spreadsheet, highlight new platforms you want to explore.

If you’re using the Sprout Social audit template, there’s a section for these types of notes in the “Summary” tab. Keep in mind this isn’t a necessity. If you’re already focused on a few networks or don’t find any new platforms that interest you at the moment, no worries.

That said, keeping tabs on new and emerging social media trends just makes sense.

10. Come up with new objectives and action items

At this point, your spreadsheet should be mostly filled out. So what’s next? The purpose of a social media audit is to give you a better understanding of where you are currently so you can make plans for the future.

This means growing your followers on a certain platform, earning more engagement or aligning your lead gen efforts. With your KPIs in hand, you have everything you need to make informed decisions.

To make your audit actionable, the template includes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis section for each network. Use this space to add big-picture takeaways, or go further by conducting a full-blown SWOT analysis after your audit. Either way, highlighting the most pressing opportunities will prepare you to act.

11. Share your audit with your team

Social media isn’t an island. With the rise of social commerce and social search, your presence matters more than ever. Sharing the results of your audit helps you:

• Get additional buy-in or resources from managers and key stakeholders

• Develop new marketing content that matches your top-performing posts and platforms

• Uncover opportunities to align your social presence across departments (think: sales)

No matter your goals, having your numbers handy can be a huge help in moving forward. A documented audit reinforces the value of treating social media reporting as an ongoing process rather than a one-time project.

How to conduct a social media audit in Sprout Social

Before posting anything new, it’s important to look at how your existing content and profiles are performing. Here’s how to use Sprout Sociala0to audit your social platforms, compare performance across networks and figure out what to improve.

1. Access the reporting section

Start by opening Sprout Social’s Reporting section. This centralized hub gives you a clear, data-backed snapshot of your current social performance.

Whether you’re managing one brand account or 20, this section is your command center. You can use it to pull up high-level reports or drill into details, like how a specific campaign performed across platforms.

To get started, click on the Reports tab in the left-hand navigation menu of your Sprout Social account.

2. Choose the right report based on your goal

Inside the Reporting section, you’ll find several pre-built reports covering different aspects of your social media strategy. To get relevant insights, start by choosing the report that aligns with your goal.

Ask yourself: What exactly am I trying to learn?

Then, choose the right report based on your objective:

• Profile Performance: An overview of your social media accounts’ overall health and growth over time. It shows follower increases and decreases, engagement trends and audience response to changes in strategy.

• Post Performance: A report with detailed metrics on individual postsincluding clicks, shares, likes and repliesto help you determine which types of content resonate most.

• Tag Performance: An analysis of the success of content themes and campaigns based on tracked tagged messages. It compares engagement across topics like behind-the-scenes content versus product launches so you can identify which themes drive the most interaction.

• Competitor Performance: A side-by-side view of how your social presence stacks up, highlighting engagement, growth and content performance differences to help you benchmark against others in your industry.

Once you select the report that fits your goal, you can apply filters to explore the data in more detail.

3. Customize and filter your reports to get deeper insights

Now apply filters to break down the data by platform, profile, content type, time frameand publishing status.

Here’s how to use each effectively:

Filter by date range (top-right corner of the report)

Use the last 30 days for monthly reviews, the last quarter for campaign wrap-ups or pick a custom range to isolate specific eventslike comparing engagement from a March campaign to a November holiday push.

For example, if you ran a Women’s Day campaign from March 1 to 10, set your date range accordingly to isolate that event.

Filter by platform or profile

Different platforms serve different purposes. Your LinkedIn audience wants thought leadership and industry news, while your TikTok crowd responds better to behind-the-scenes content and short-form videos. Lumping them together blurs what’s working.

To get a clearer view of performance, narrow your report by network. To do this, click the dropdown menu labeled Sources and choose:

• A specific network (like Instagram)

• A business unit (like @Brand_US vs. @Brand_Global)

• A group of profiles (such as all retail accounts)

For instance, let’s say you run a restaurant chain with five Instagram accounts, one per region. You can filter your audit to compare engagement across each. If your Manhattan handle sees more saves but fewer replies than your Austin handle, you can adjust your content accordingly.

Filter by post type

Each platform supports different types of content, so they don’t all perform the same. What works on one platform might not land on another.

If your team posts a mix of formats across networks, use the Post Type filter inside your Post Performance report to compare performance side by side. You might filter for:

• Reels to check reach and engagement on Instagram

• Replies to see how customer support content performs on X

• Stories to measure engagement with time-sensitive updates

• Ad Posts to separate promoted content

For example, imagine you run social for a project management software company. You post Instagram Reels with quick tips, like “3 ways to speed up team approvals,” and Carousels that break down workflows. When you filter by post type, you’ll see that Reels get twice the reach, but Carousels earn more saves and profile clicks.

You realize people enjoy Reels for discovery but come back to Carousels when they’re serious about learning. This helps you adjust your content strategynot just for performance but also to support real business goals.

Filter by published status

When you’re reviewing results or planning your next post, it’s best to focus only on the content that matters. Need to see just what went live? Or separate boosted posts from unpublished ones? Sprouta0Social’s Published Status filter lets you do exactly that. It quickly sorts your content based on what went live, what you promoted and what stayed behind the scenes.

Heres what each option shows:

• Published: Displays all posts you successfully published across your connected social networks

• Unpublished: Pulls unpublished posts, such as drafts or posts before going live

• Boosted: Filters for posts that you promoted using ad spend

This filter is especially useful when auditing organic versus paid performance or verifying whether certain scheduled content actually went out.

4. Analyze key insights

Looking at numbers alone won’t tell you much unless you know how to make sense of what you see. The next step is looking for trends, outliers and, most importantly, opportunities to improve.

Look at performance over time to get the comprehensive picture

Start with Sprouta0Social’s Profile Performance report to spot long-term trends across impressions, engagement rate, link clicks and follower growth. These top-level metrics show how visible your content is, how well it connects with your audience and whether it drives action.

Use the date filter to put the numbers in context, such as:

• Last 30 days for quick wins

• Last quarter for campaign-level insights

• Year-over-year for seasonal or annual shifts

Are the numbers trending up or down? Are there weekly patterns? Did certain days spike or dip?

Say you filter for the last 90 days and notice engagement spikes every Friday. You check the Post Performance report and spot the pattern: Friday posts are behind-the-scenes Reels showing your team packing weekend orders. They’re short, personal and consistently earn more shares and saves than anything else.

With that insight, you might:

• Prioritize Fridays in your content calendar

• Post more BTS Reels around launches and team moments

• Tag them in Sprouta0Social (e.g., #BTS_Friday) to track performance

The takeaway? Don’t just note what’s workingdig into why so you can build on it.

Find your top-performing content and learn from it

Next, use the Post Performance report to find the posts that resonated most. What got the most engagement, and which posts did people ignore?

You can sort your posts by:

• Engagement rate to see which posts your audience actively interacted with

• Clicks to highlight what drove traffic

• Reach to understand what got the most exposure

• Platform or post type to break down patterns across formats

Pro tip: Don’t just look at the top one or two posts. Zoom out and review the top 1015 to get a better sense of what your audience consistently cares about. Our guide on social media metrics can help you decide which numbers matter most for your goals.

Identify underperformers to figure out what to improve

Now, flip your view and sort your posts from the lowest engagement to the highest.

It’s easy to overlook low performers, but they’re often where the biggest lessons live. Poor results can reveal issues like messaging that missed the mark or content that didn’t match the platform.

Some things to check for include:

• Timing issues: Did you publish the post when your audience wasn’t active?

• Format mismatch: Did you try a text-heavy PDF on Instagram or a video without captions on LinkedIn?

• Weak visuals: Did the creative feel off-brand, cluttered or hard to read on mobile?

• Missing CTA: Did the caption invite the audience to do somethingclick, comment or shareor did it just end without direction?

Understanding what didn’t work helps you course-correct faster.

Tie every metric back to a business goal

After finding the highs and lows, consider what they say about how social supports your business. Knowing why something happened matters more than simply reporting that it did.

For example:

• If you’re focused on brand awareness, keep an eye on impressions, reach, shares and video views. These tell you how far your message is spreading and how visible your brand is becomingeven to people who aren’t following you yet.

• If community engagement is the goal, consider comments, replies, saves and DMs. These reveal whether people resonate with your content enough to interact with it.

• If you’re aiming for traffic, sign-ups or sales, prioritize link clicks and profile visits. These show intent and give you a clearer read on ROIstrong signs you’re moving people down the funnel.

If you’re still trying to figure out what you want to achieve, our guide on setting social media goals can help you find the right metrics to focus on.

5. Automate, export and share reports

Once you’ve customized your view and pulled key insights, it’s time to share the story. Sprouta0Social makes it easy to deliver data to your team, clients or leadership so everyone knows what’s working and where to focus next.

To export a visual report, open any report (like Profile Performance or Tag Performance), click Share and choose PDF or CSV. You can download it, share it instantly or schedule it for later.

Pro tip: Use the PDF version to share wins and trends with clients or leadership. Use CSV if you need to dig into the data.

Automate and schedule recurring reports

Sprouta0Social also lets you program reports to go out automaticallyweekly or monthlyso your team gets regular updates without manual work.

To schedule recurring reports, click Share > Schedule Report, choose your recipients (up to 25), set your frequency and name your export so it’s easy to find.

Pro tip: Use PDFs for polished overviews and CSVs for deeper analysis.

Need a walkthrough? a0Sprout Social’s Scheduling and Sending Report guide covers how to schedule and send reports one step at a time.

6. Optimize social media strategy

To get the most out of your audit, use the insights you gained to refine your approach. Double down on what works, rethink what doesn’t and tailor content to fit each platform.

Here’s a quick checklist to guide your next steps:

• Focus on what works: Pinpoint what made your top-performing posts click. Was it the format, timing or tone that made them successful? For example, if your Instagram Reels featuring quick tips consistently drive saves and profile visits, build a recurring series into your calendar.

• Tweak or pause what underperforms: Low performers often need format, timing or clarity fixes. If a LinkedIn carousel didn’t land, perhaps the headline lacked punch or the CTA wasn’t clear. Instead of scrapping the topic, adjust the execution and try again.

• Match content to network goals: Audits help you see where different formats shine. If explainer Reels perform on Instagram but flop on LinkedIn, use them where they deliver and pivot to in-depth content like customer stories elsewhere.

Sprouta0Social makes it easy to keep honing your social media content strategy as you go. You can tag postslike “Test: Friendly Tone”and then track performance using the Tag Performance report.

To create and manage tags, click Tag, and either choose a tag from the dropdown or type a new tag. Then press Enter, and Sprout Sociala0will save it automatically.

After you tag your content, schedule weekly or monthly performance reports to monitor your successes. Scheduling makes it easy to spot wins and make adjustmentswithout digging through data manually.

A social media audit template to enhance your strategy

Don’t let the word “audit” intimidate you. Sprouta0Social’s social media audit template does the heavy lifting, so just plug in your numbers. If youre already using a social media analytics tool like Sprout, honing in on your key audit metrics is super simple.

Download our free social media audit template

Since priorities vary from brand to brand, feel free to customize the template based on your needs. Be sure to include the following:

• Profile information (name and URL)

• Engagement metrics

• Publishing metrics

• Audience demographics

• Referral traffic

• Platform-specific metrics

Remember to include the percent change from the previous month and the previous year. Since retailers typically see a surge in social media activity during the holidays, looking at year-over-year numbers helps account for seasonal changes.

How often should you run a social media audit?

A social media audit works best on a rhythm. For most brands, a quarterly cadence gives you enough time to spot patterns, make strategic changes and measure progress before the next cycle begins.

Add a lighter monthly check-in if your team publishes at high volume, manages multiple profiles or handles customer care on social media platforms. You should also run an unscheduled audit after any major campaign, rebrand, team transition or platform shift.

The goal is consistency. Pick a cadence, document it and treat your audit as a repeatable business process, not a once-a-year scramble.

Examples of an effective social media audit

The right audit format depends on your team size, publishing volume and how you plan to use the results. Here are three approaches to consider:

Example #1: The in-depth audit

An in-depth approach tracks engagement, audience growth and publishing frequency across multiple accounts. It’s ideal for brands posting frequently and looking to see what’s really moving the needle.

Example #2: The quick audit

Faster, more cursory audits with “yes” or “no” questions are great for high-level answers to questions like:

• Are our brand logos and creative consistent across platforms?

• Have we posted new content on each network within the past week?

• Have we achieved “inbox zero” for our social customer service questions and concerns?

• Are our bio links pointing to our most recent (or relevant) promotions?

• Which platform is currently our most engaged or fastest growing?

These audits are quick because they involve big-picture details and fewer data points. While not super result-driven, they still beat letting your social platforms gather cobwebs.

Example #3: The social media agency audit

For social media marketing agencies that manage multiple clients with diverse needs, presenting audit results in a visually compelling deck instead of a spreadsheet is far more effective.

A well-designed deck uses visuals and concise language to distill complex data into key takeaways. This approach not only reinforces the agency’s expertise and professionalism but also makes the audit actionable and easy to understand.

What social media audit tools should I be using?

Thearight tools depend on the depth and frequency of your audits. At minimum, you need an analytics platform, a website traffic tool and a way to connect social data to business outcomes. Here’s how the three tools covered in this section fit together:

Tool	Primary audit function	Best for	Key audit features
Sprout Social	Cross-platform social analytics and reporting	Social media managers, marketing teams, agencies	Profile Performance, Post Performance, Competitor Performance, Tag Performance, Premium Analytics, scheduled PDF/CSV reports
Google Analytics (GA4)	Website traffic attribution from social platforms	Teams tracking referral traffic and on-site conversion from social	Acquisition > Social report, landing page performance, traffic source breakdown
Salesforce	CRM integration to tie social touchpoints to business outcomes	Enterprise teams connecting social data to pipeline and revenue	Social touchpoint tracking, Tableau dashboards, cross-channel attribution

Sprout Social

Sprout Social simplifies the process of conducting a comprehensive social media audit, making it an invaluable tool for gaining actionable insights and aligning your strategy.

With Sprouta0Social’s cross-platform analytics, you can track performance metrics across multiple networksall in one place. Whether it’s Facebook Page impressions, X link clicks, Instagram follower growth, LinkedIn engagement or Pinterest content performance, Sprout Sociala0provides an all-in-one solution to monitor, compare and evaluate your social presence.

Save time on audit report creation using Sprout Socialas Premium Analytics add-on. Dynamic links, selectable metrics and interactive charts and graphs help teams show the impact of their efforts in presentation-ready reports.

Google Analytics

Chances are you already have Google Analytics (specifically GA4) set up. If so, integrating your Google data into your audit is an obvious next step. From traffic sources to landing pages, search data can align your social media marketing strategy with your search presence.

Salesforce

Anything you can do to illustrate the value of social media to stakeholders is a plus. With a CRM like Salesforce integrated with your social data, you can monitor touchpoints and events that result in tangible outcomes for your business.

Turn your next audit into a growth strategy

A strong audit does more than organize your numbers. It sharpens your strategy, closes the gap between your social efforts and business goals and gives you the evidence you need to earn leadership buy-in.

According to the 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, 58% of teams rated as “experts” at measuring the business impact of social rely on social media management tools. The teams that run audits consistently are the same teams that make faster decisions, justify bigger budgets and build stronger social programs over time.

Download Sprout’s free social media audit template to get started! To get access to your social metrics all in one place and make every social media audit easier, test out Sprout’s capabilities with aastart aa0free 30-day trialato see how Sprout Social makes every audit faster and more actionable.

Frequently asked questions about social media audits

How often should you conduct a social media audit?

Run a comprehensive audit quarterly, with lighter monthly check-ins for high-volume publishing teams. Also run one after any major campaign, rebrand or platform shift.

What's the difference between a social media audit and a social media report?

A social media report tracks performance over a defined time period, while an audit is a comprehensive review of your entire social presence, covering profiles, content, audience, branding and strategy alignment. Reports show what happened; audits show what to change.

How AI tools support your social media audit

Yes, AI accelerates the audit process by organizing data, surfacing patterns and summarizing performance, and Sprout Social’s AI-powered reporting features do exactly that. Human judgment is still essential for translating those insights into strategy decisions that fit your brand and audience.

What does a completed social media audit look like?

A completed audit includes a profile inventory, key metrics by platform, audience insights, top and low-performing content, a competitive benchmark and a prioritized action list with clear ownership. Download the free Sprout Social audit template to see a ready-to-use example.