I had one task sitting on my list since late July: run an audience audit on my own social account. Twenty minutes of work. It sat there for almost a month while I built things for other people and argued with myself about how to get in front of more of the right ones.
This week I finally did it. The number I was chasing turned out to be the wrong problem.
What an audience audit actually is
An audience audit is not analytics. It is not impressions, reach, or a chart of your posting streak.
It is one question, asked with a filter: of the people already following me, how many are the kind of person I want as a customer, and where are they?
That is it. On most platforms you answer it by filtering your own followers or connections by location and by job title, and then counting. No tools to buy. No consultant. You are reading a list you already own.
What I found in twenty minutes
Here is my own count, unrounded:
- 2,715 followers, and 2,277 of them are already connections — meaning only about 438 people follow me who I am not already linked to.
- Roughly a third are in the United States. The rest are from fifteen years of running operations on the other side of the world.
- In my own metro area, filtering for owner-level titles, I get somewhere between 100 and 140 people.
- Of the first eight I opened, five were exactly who I say I serve — a design-build contractor, a construction company president, a home-improvement owner, an immigration attorney with his own practice, a small law partner.
I had never messaged a single one of them.
Why was my own guess so far off?
Because I guessed globally and acted locally. A month earlier I had written down a rough estimate: if even three percent of my followers are business owners, that is about eighty prospects worldwide. It felt conservative. It was too low, and it was too low in the place that mattered — my own city alone carried more than my worldwide guess.
There is a second thing in those numbers that I did not expect. Almost everyone who follows me is someone I connected with directly. My audience did not grow because of clever posts. It grew one handshake at a time. That single fact settled a strategy argument I had been having for weeks about what to spend my mornings on.
Your own audit will contain a fact like that. You cannot predict which one. That is the whole reason to run it.
The move it changed
I was two weeks from starting a daily routine of twenty cold outreach requests to strangers.
I am not doing that first. Not because it is a bad idea — because there are roughly 140 warm, named, local business owners sitting in a list I have had for years, and it makes no sense to go hunting for the 141st before I have spoken to any of the first 140.
Cold outreach did not get cancelled. It got demoted to second.
Do this before you buy an ad
If you sell to a specific kind of person in a specific place, run the audit this week:
- Filter your existing followers or connections by location. Use your actual service area, not "the whole country."
- Filter again by the title your buyer holds — owner, founder, president, partner. Titles overlap, so do not add the buckets together.
- Open the first eight results and read them properly. You are checking whether the filter is finding real people or noise.
- Write the number down. It is your baseline, and it is the number every future plan should argue against.
Then be honest about the limit of what you just did. An audit is not a conversation. Looking up a list is the easy part, and I have not messaged anybody yet either.
Before you spend money reaching new people, spend twenty minutes counting the ones who already said yes.
If you have never once looked, I would bet the number surprises you the same way mine did.