Social Media Strategy & Audit
A plan before you hire an agency. Or an honest second opinion on the one you already have.
Most Malta brands hire a social agency, fire it nine months later, then hire another and repeat the cycle. The pattern is almost always the same: nobody ran a real audit before the retainer started, so nobody could tell whether the new content was actually working.
This is the work that comes before the retainer. We forensically read your last 12 months of performance, benchmark you against named competitors, build the content pillars and 90-day calendar, and hand it over. You can run it in-house, hand it to any agency, or come back to us for the managed build.
Four artefacts. Zero slideware.
The deliverables are deliberately short and operational. Every artefact is something a marketing lead can act on the day it lands — not a 200-page report that gets archived.
Channel Audit Deck
A 35-50 slide forensic teardown of your existing social presence. We score every active channel against engagement quality, posting cadence, creative consistency, hook craft, and conversion path. You see exactly which posts earned their slot in the feed and which ones quietly damaged your account.
Competitor Matrix
Five to eight named competitors benchmarked side-by-side: posting frequency, top-performing formats, hook patterns, paid amplification footprint, and the gaps you can credibly own. Delivered as a spreadsheet you can sort, filter, and update yourself after we leave.
Content Pillar Framework
Three to five content pillars chosen from the audit data, not from a workshop sticky-note exercise. Each pillar comes with proof-points, hook archetypes, example posts, and a clear definition of what is and is not on-brief — so any writer or editor can produce on-pillar content the next day.
90-Day Editorial Calendar
A working calendar with daily slots for the next 90 days. Each slot names the pillar, the platform, the format, the hook angle, and the call-to-action. You can hand this to any in-house creator, agency, or freelancer and the plan keeps running without us.
Three weeks of work. Then a plan you can ship.
We run the same engagement shape every time. Calendar invites for the kick-off and the read-out are sent on day one, so the project never drifts and the read-out date is non-negotiable.
Data pull and competitor scrape
We start with a 60-minute intake call to capture the commercial context — what you sell, who buys, what success looks like in 90 days. Then we pull the last 12 months of analytics from every channel you give us read access to, scrape the named competitors, and load everything into our analysis workspace.
Audit deck and matrix build
The senior strategist writes the audit narrative slide by slide. Findings are tied to data — every claim cites the post, the metric, or the competitor benchmark behind it. We avoid generic best-practice slides; if a finding is true for every brand on the planet, it does not earn a slide in your deck.
Read-out and 90-day plan
The founder walks you and your team through the deck on a 90-minute call. We rebuild the editorial calendar live in response to your team's questions, then send the final files within 48 hours. You leave the call with a plan you can start executing on Monday morning.
Implementation handover
Available on the Audit + Implementation Handover tier. We onboard your in-house team or your existing agency, write the SOPs (briefing, approvals, reporting), set up the dashboard, and check back at the 30-day mark to recalibrate the calendar against the first month of real performance.
Three project tiers. Fixed scope. Fixed price.
Project pricing means you know the bill before the work starts. Most Malta brands choose Strategy & Audit. The Sprint suits founders piloting one channel; the Implementation Handover suits in-house teams who want our SOPs and reporting cadence baked in.
Strategy Sprint
- One channel audited in depth
- Competitor matrix (3-5 competitors)
- Content pillar framework
- 90-day posting plan
- One read-out call
Strategy & Audit
- Up to three channels audited
- Competitor matrix (5-8 competitors)
- Paid-vs-organic mix recommendation
- Full 90-day editorial calendar
- Board-ready slide deck
- Founder-led read-out call
Audit + Implementation Handover
- Everything in Strategy & Audit
- Four-week implementation handover
- Briefing, approval, and reporting SOPs
- Dashboard and weekly cadence setup
- 30-day recalibration check-in
You probably want this if…
- You're about to brief an agency and want a benchmark to brief them against.
- You're nine months into a retainer that feels expensive, and you need an honest second opinion.
- You have an in-house marketer who is great at execution but needs the strategy written down.
- You're a Malta brand entering a new market and want a content plan that lands locally.
- Your last social plan was a one-off workshop, the deck is on someone's hard drive, and nobody has opened it in six months.
What this audit is — and what it deliberately is not
We have sat in too many social-media workshops where the output was a Miro board of sticky-notes, a list of trending TikTok formats, and a vague promise that the agency would "iterate from there." That is not what we sell here. The Strategy & Audit is a forensic engagement: every recommendation traces back to a specific post, a specific competitor benchmark, or a specific gap in the market that we can name and defend.
Our analysis pulls from three data layers. First, your own analytics — every post from the last 12 months, scored on engagement quality (saves, shares, replies) rather than vanity metrics like impressions. Second, the named competitor set — we manually classify their last 90 days of content into formats, hooks, and pillars so you can see exactly what is working in your market and what is being neglected. Third, the search and discovery layer — what people in Malta are actually searching for on TikTok, what they are asking on Reddit, what is trending in the long-tail of YouTube. Strategy that ignores any one of these three layers is guessing.
What this audit is not: a generic best-practice list, an exhaustive competitor screenshot deck, or a 90-page report that nobody on your team will read past page 12. The deck is short on purpose. Every slide has to earn its place. If a finding is true for every brand on the planet, it does not appear in the deliverable. The point is to give your marketing lead a plan that is sharp enough to brief into production on Monday morning, not a thesis that wins design awards in November.
Included in every tier
- Founder-led intake and read-out — not handed to a junior
- Manual classification of competitor content (no scraped-keyword shortcuts)
- Named content pillars with example posts you can copy
- 90-day calendar with hooks, formats, and CTAs per slot
- All raw files, spreadsheets, and decks transferred to your Drive
Not included — by design
- ×Daily content production or posting (that is the managed retainer)
- ×A 200-slide industry report nobody reads
- ×Vanity-metric dashboards (impressions, follower count vanity)
- ×Generic best-practice slides that apply to every brand on earth
- ×An open-ended scope that drifts past the read-out date
Why we sell the audit separately from the retainer
Honest version: most agencies bundle the audit into the first month of a retainer for free. That sounds generous, but it almost always means the audit is a sales document — the conclusion is decided before the work starts, and the conclusion is always "you should sign the retainer." It also means the audit gets the junior strategist, because the senior team is busy on paid retainers.
We sell the audit as a paid project so the analysis is genuinely independent. If the honest read on your channels is that you are doing fine and you do not need an agency at all, we will write that down in the deck. If the honest read is that you should fire your current agency before signing anyone new, we will write that down too. Charging for the work is what makes the work worth reading.
The senior strategist is on every engagement. The founder runs the read-out call. The deliverables are short, sharp, and yours to keep. If you graduate to the managed retainer afterwards, we credit the fee back. If you do not, the work still pays for itself the first time it stops you from signing the wrong agency.
Want us to actually run it?
The audit ends with a plan you can hand to anyone. If you want the people who wrote the plan to also build the calendar, produce the content, schedule the posts, and report weekly, the natural next step is the managed retainer.
We credit the audit fee against the first month of the retainer if you continue with us — so the strategy work is, effectively, free if you graduate to the managed engagement.
Social Strategy & Audit FAQ
Common questions about our one-time social strategy and audit engagement