How to Run a Social Media Audit in Singapore (2026 Guide)

Most social media audits are a forty-slide deck that describes what happened, reaches no conclusion, and changes nothing. The person who commissioned it reads the executive summary, agrees that engagement is indeed down, and files it.

A useful audit answers three questions and then stops: what do we stop doing, what do we keep doing, and what do we start doing? Everything else in the deck exists only to justify those answers. This guide is a working method for producing them — in about a day and a half for a single-brand Singapore SME — including the Singapore-specific compliance and account-ownership checks that almost no audit template covers and that regularly turn out to be the most valuable part.

It sits under our guide to social media management in Singapore, and it is the sensible first step before committing to a content calendar or a budget.

Last updated: July 2026. Written by Adrian Tan, SDM.

Do this first, before anything else: export the data

Every platform deletes your history. Most audits discover this on day two, when someone asks for a year-on-year comparison and finds the data no longer exists. Start the audit by exporting, because the export is the only step that gets harder if you delay it.

Export everything available, drop it in a dated folder, and set a recurring monthly reminder to repeat it. That single habit is worth more than most audits.

The audit in eight steps

Step 2: The account and access inventory

This is the step that most often produces something genuinely alarming, and it takes an hour. List every account, page, ad account, pixel, catalogue and business portfolio associated with the brand, and for each one record: who owns it, who has admin access, and whether that person still works here.

The recurring findings in Singapore SMEs, in rough order of frequency:

• An abandoned account nobody remembers creating — usually a second Facebook page or an old Instagram handle from a rebrand — still ranking in search and still receiving customer messages nobody reads.
• A former employee or ex-agency holding the only admin role on the Meta business portfolio or the ad account. This is a business-continuity risk, not a housekeeping one.
• The agency owning the ad account and pixel rather than the client. If your previous agency created the assets under their own business portfolio, your historical data and audiences leave with them. Ownership should sit with the business; agencies should be granted partner access.
• Ad account currency or time zone set wrongly at creation. Neither can be changed afterwards, which quietly distorts every report you will ever run.

Fix the ownership problems first. They are cheap to fix now and expensive to fix during a dispute. If your tracking setup is part of this picture, our guide to setting up the Meta Pixel properly covers the data side.

Step 3: Baseline the numbers

Record the same small set of metrics for every platform, for the last 90 days, and for the 90 days before that. Resist the urge to collect more; the audit’s value is in comparison, not volume.

Write down your engagement-rate formula before you calculate anything, because there is no standard one and the choice changes the answer by several multiples. “Interactions divided by followers” and “interactions divided by reach” are both defensible and produce wildly different numbers.

Step 4: Benchmark against reality

The most common failure in a social audit is comparing your account against a number somebody invented. Socialinsider’s 2026 benchmark study — roughly 70 million posts published between January 2024 and December 2025 — gives defensible published medians for engagement rate by followers.

Read those bars with the footnote attached. TikTok’s engagement rate is calculated on likes, comments, shares and saves; Instagram’s on likes and comments alone. TikTok genuinely does out-engage Instagram, but not by the eight-fold margin the raw numbers suggest. If your audit places these two figures side by side without the caveat, you will reach the wrong conclusion about where to invest.

Two more honest benchmarking rules. Your own trend is the primary benchmark — a median across seventy million global posts tells you very little about a Singapore aesthetics clinic with 4,000 followers. And declining engagement rates are the industry-wide default, not evidence of your failure; multiple large datasets show year-on-year declines across nearly every platform as follower counts grow faster than distribution.

Step 5: The content audit

This is where the answers actually come from. Pull your last 90 days of posts into a spreadsheet and sort them four ways: top ten by reach, bottom ten by reach, top ten by engagement rate, bottom ten by engagement rate.

Then look for the pattern, not the post. Tag each of the top performers with: format (Reel, carousel, static, Story), topic pillar, whether a face appears, whether there is a hook in the first two seconds, whether it is about the customer’s problem or about your company, and whether it was original or repurposed.

What you are looking for is a repeatable format, not a lucky post. If four of your top ten are carousels breaking down a price or a process, that is a format. If your best post is a photo of the team at a D&D, that is not a strategy you can execute against, however many likes it got.

The bottom ten matter as much. In Singapore SME accounts the same categories of underperformer recur: festive greeting graphics, award and certification announcements, reposted press coverage, and “we are hiring” posts on the brand account. None of these are wrong to publish. They just should not be counted as marketing, and they should not crowd out the content that reaches non-followers.

Cross-check what you find against the platform-specific guidance in our companion guides to growing on Instagram organically and growing on TikTok in Singapore, since the format conclusions differ by platform.

Step 6: Audience and profile

Audience. Compare your follower demographics against your actual customer base. The mismatch is common and consequential: a B2B services firm whose Instagram audience is 70% overseas students, or a premium retailer whose followers skew fifteen years younger than its buyers. If the audience is wrong, engagement is not a good thing — it is noise that will keep pulling your content in the wrong direction.

Profile. Twenty minutes per account, checking the things that convert attention into contact:

• Does the bio say what you do, for whom, in Singapore — in the first line, before the truncation?
• Are the words a customer would search for in the name field and bio? Both are indexed by in-app search, which matters far more now that hashtags do not.
• Is there a working link, and does it point somewhere relevant rather than the homepage?
• Are contact buttons, opening hours and location set on the platforms that support them?
• Are the top three pinned posts the ones you would choose to represent the business today?
• Is branding consistent across accounts — same handle where possible, same avatar, same name format?

Step 7: The competitor scan

Pick three or four genuine competitors — the ones customers actually shortlist you against, not the market leader whose budget is thirty times yours. For each, record over the last 90 days: platforms active, posting cadence, follower count and growth, dominant format, apparent content pillars, and the three posts that clearly outperformed the rest of their feed.

You are looking for two things. Gaps: a topic your customers plainly care about that nobody in your category is covering well. And proof of format: if all four competitors are getting traction with one format and you are not using it, that is a cheaper signal than running the experiment yourself.

Resist copying cadence. A competitor posting daily may be doing so profitably or may be burning a staff member for nothing — you cannot tell from the outside, and matching it is how small teams collapse.

Step 8: The compliance and risk check

Almost no audit template includes this section, and in Singapore it is the one that can carry actual financial consequences. Work through the list that applies to you.

• Influencer and gifted-content disclosure. The Singapore Code of Advertising Practice, administered by ASAS, requires advertising to be clearly recognisable as such. Where a creator received payment, free product, commission or any material benefit, the disclosure must be visible without the viewer expanding the caption — and the brand, as advertiser, carries primary responsibility. Review your past twelve months of collaborations, not just your future ones. Live-stream commerce and short-form video are under particular scrutiny.
• PDPA and customer imagery. A customer tagging you is not consent to use their image and likeness in your marketing. Check whether you hold consent for every customer photo, testimonial and user-generated post currently live on your accounts. Note also that the legitimate-interests exception under the PDPA does not cover direct marketing, and that Do Not Call obligations attach to Singapore phone numbers — so a social DM may be unregulated while the WhatsApp follow-up is not.
• Healthcare and aesthetics. Providers regulated under the Healthcare Services Act face hard prohibitions on before-and-after imagery, superlatives, guarantees, price promotions and republished patient reviews — including screenshotted Google reviews, even with patient consent. Penalties run to S$20,000 and up to twelve months, and the marketing agency running the account can itself be an “authorised person” and personally liable. Our healthcare marketing guide covers this in detail.
• Food and beverage. Nutri-Grade “D” beverages cannot be advertised across broadcast, print or online. Halal claims require MUIS-certified premises. False or misleading food and health claims are prohibited under the Sale of Food Act.
• Financial services. The MAS Guidelines on Standards of Conduct for Digital Advertising Activities, issued 25 September 2025, took effect on 25 March 2026. They require digital advertising to be fair, balanced and not misleading, and hold the board and senior management accountable — including for content produced by third parties and influencers.

If any of these turn up problems, they go straight into the “stop” column, ahead of every performance finding.

The output: one page

The deliverable is not the spreadsheet. It is a single page with three columns, each holding no more than five items, each item specific enough to act on this week.

Attach a target and a review date. “Non-follower reach up 25% by 31 October” is a decision. “Improve engagement” is not.

How often to audit

A full audit of the kind described here is an annual exercise, best run just before you set the next year’s plan and budget. Between those, a light quarterly version — export, baseline metrics, top and bottom ten posts, one page — takes about three hours and is enough to catch drift.

Run an unscheduled full audit whenever one of four things happens: you change agency or hire an in-house marketer, results flatten for two consecutive quarters, you enter a new market or category, or you are about to increase budget materially. The last case is the important one — auditing after you have spent the money is expensive research.

If the audit’s conclusion is that you need more capacity rather than a different strategy, our guide to what social media management costs in Singapore sets out the market ranges, and organic vs paid social covers where the next dollar is best spent. On cadence specifically, how often to post on social media works through the evidence.

Grants and the audit

Two points worth knowing before anyone budgets for this. The Productivity Solutions Grant supports pre-approved solutions — including social media scheduling, monitoring and analytics tools — at up to 50% of qualifying cost, and SDM is a pre-approved PSG vendor. An audit as a consulting exercise, ongoing management retainers and advertising spend are generally not claimable, and the Enterprise Development Grant explicitly excludes advertising and media buys. The business applies through the Business Grants Portal itself; no third party applies on your behalf. The Market Readiness Assistance grant has supported up to 70% of qualifying overseas promotion costs since 1 April 2026, capped at S$20,000 for promotion, if the audit is part of an overseas expansion. The forthcoming EDGE scheme is expected in the second half of 2026, with no confirmed figures on any primary government page as of writing.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a social media audit take?

About a day and a half of focused work for a single-brand Singapore SME running two or three platforms, split roughly as 45 minutes exporting data, an hour on account ownership, two hours baselining metrics, three hours on the content audit, three hours on audience, profile and competitors, and an hour on compliance. Multi-brand or multi-market businesses scale from there. If it is taking a week, you are collecting rather than deciding.

What is a good engagement rate for a Singapore business?

It depends entirely on the platform and the formula. Socialinsider’s 2026 benchmark of roughly 70 million posts puts median engagement rate by followers at about 3.73% on TikTok, 0.48% on Instagram, 0.15% on Facebook and 0.12% on X — but TikTok’s figure counts saves and shares while Instagram’s counts only likes and comments, so they are not directly comparable. Your own quarter-on-quarter trend is a more useful benchmark than any global median.

Should I audit my competitors’ accounts too?

Yes, but briefly and against the right competitors — the three or four your customers actually shortlist you against, not the category leader. Ninety minutes recording their cadence, formats, pillars and three best-performing posts is enough. You are looking for content gaps and for proof that a format works in your category. Do not copy their posting frequency; you cannot tell from outside whether it is profitable for them.

What social media data do I lose if I do not export it?

Most of it, quickly. Instagram’s in-app Insights hold roughly 90 days and Stories metrics about 14 days. TikTok’s granular video data is effectively capped near 60 days. LinkedIn Page analytics run on a rolling 12 months, but individual post analytics expire 60 days after posting. And Meta’s Ads Insights API tightened historical retention from 12 January 2026, capping unique-count fields and hourly breakdowns at 13 months and frequency data at six. A monthly export takes fifteen minutes and is the highest-return habit in social media management.

Does a social media audit cover compliance, and does it need to in Singapore?

It should, and most templates do not. The checks that matter locally are ASAS disclosure on past influencer and gifted collaborations, PDPA consent for customer photos and testimonials currently live on your accounts, and sector rules — the Healthcare Services Act for clinics and aesthetics, Nutri-Grade and halal rules for F&B, and the MAS digital advertising guidelines that took effect on 25 March 2026 for financial institutions. These carry real penalties, and in healthcare the agency running the account can be personally liable.

Can I claim a social media audit under PSG?

Generally no. The Productivity Solutions Grant funds pre-approved solutions such as scheduling, monitoring and analytics tools at up to 50% of qualifying cost — not consulting exercises, ongoing retainers or advertising spend. The Enterprise Development Grant explicitly excludes advertising and media buys. The business applies via the Business Grants Portal itself before committing to the spend; SDM is a pre-approved PSG vendor but does not apply on a client’s behalf.

Where to go from here

An audit is only worth the day it takes if something changes the following week. If you would rather have someone else run it and hand you the one page, talk to us about social media marketing — and our Singapore client case studies show what the work looks like once the decisions have been made.

Related social media guides

• How to measure social media ROI in Singapore
• Community management in Singapore: handling comments and DMs