A social review usually starts in the wrong place. Somebody looks at the posts, says there should be more of them, and recommends posting more often.
That skips the two things that actually matter, and both are boring: what accounts exist in the business's name, and who can get into them.
Marque & Heir works these in order. What follows is that method for local businesses across the United States.
Find every account, including the ones nobody remembers
Search for the business name on each platform and record everything that appears. Not just the account the owner uses. Everything.
Local businesses routinely have more accounts than anyone realises:
- An account made by a former employee.
- A page created automatically by a platform from public information.
- A duplicate set up by someone who could not find the original.
- An account from an old trading name.
- A page created by a well-meaning customer.
- An account from a location that has moved or closed.
Each one is a place a customer might land. Each is publishing something in the business's name, whether or not anyone is looking.
Record for each: the platform, the exact name, the address, when it was last active, the number of followers, the contact details it shows, and whether anyone at the business can get into it.
Sort them before judging any of them
With the list in hand, put each account into one of four boxes:
Keep and use. The real account, controlled by the business.
Keep and correct. Controlled, but showing wrong details.
Reclaim. Genuinely the business's, but nobody can get in. Most platforms have a process for this; it takes time and evidence.
Retire. A duplicate or obsolete account. Where possible, merge or close it. Where not, at minimum point it at the right one.
Deal with these before touching content. A perfect posting routine on one account while three others show a disconnected phone number has not solved the business's problem.
Check what each one says about the business
For every account the business keeps, check the facts against a single source: name, address, phone, hours, service area, website link, and description.
Then check them against the website and against the business's map and search listings. These four should agree. They frequently do not, and the disagreement is invisible from inside the business because nobody looks at all of them together.
Write down every disagreement and which one is right. That list is usually the most valuable output of the whole review.
Then look at what is actually being posted
Now the content, and the useful questions are narrower than they first appear.
Does it show the work? For most local businesses, photographs of finished jobs outperform everything else, because they are the only content nobody else can produce.
Would a stranger understand what the business does? Read the last ten posts as somebody who has never heard of it.
Can somebody act? A visitor who decides to make contact should be able to, from the account, without hunting.
Is anyone answering? Unanswered comments and unread messages cost more than infrequent posting. Platforms often show how quickly a business replies, and a visible slow reply is worse than not being there.
Is it consistent enough to look alive? The bar is lower than most think. A page with something from this month reads as active. One whose last post is from two years ago raises a question.
Count what can be counted, and say what it means
It is fine to record followers, posting frequency, and the response rate the platform reports. Those are the business's own figures.
Be careful what is concluded from them. Follower counts are a poor guide to whether an account brings work. Engagement on a small local account moves for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. And none of these numbers is evidence about what any other business achieves.
Where the review names a number, it should say where it came from and when it was read. Platform figures change and are defined differently on each one.
Decide what the business can actually sustain
The recommendation that fails is to post several times a week. It fails because the person who would do it is running a business.
Ask what is realistic and build the plan around that. One good post a week, showing real work, with messages answered, beats a schedule that lasts a fortnight.
Then name who does it and when. Social accounts fail on ownership more than on ideas.
Settle access before finishing
Every account the business keeps should be reachable by more than one person, with access held by the business rather than an individual, and recovery details pointing somewhere the business controls.
This is the step that prevents the next audit finding the same locked account. Do it while somebody still has access, because doing it afterwards is the reclaim process, and that is much harder.
What this work does not include
It does not include gaining access to accounts the business cannot prove it owns, removing content posted by other people, or promising reach, followers, or enquiries. Platform decisions about accounts belong to the platforms.
If a business is not sure what exists in its name, the free business check looks from the outside — what a customer finds when they search — and lists the accounts and details currently on public view, including the ones nobody at the business remembers creating.
Check what the accounts point at
Every account carries a link, and those links rot quietly. A page pointing at a website address that has changed, at a page that was removed in a rebuild, or at a booking service the business stopped using is sending interested people nowhere.
Open every link on every account and record where it actually lands. Include the ones in profile descriptions and in pinned posts, which are the ones nobody thinks to check.
Then decide what each should point at. For most local businesses that is the home page or a single contact route, not a page deep in the site that may be reorganised later. And where a link is used in more than one place, changing it should be one job, not five — which is an argument for pointing every account at the same stable address.