When you’re running a content audit, what is the first thing you need to do?

The first step in a content audit is to establish or re-establish the original goals and objectives. Without clear goals, it's impossible to evaluate content effectiveness or determine what success looks like. The audit's purpose is to assess how well existing content supports these objectives. Compiling content URLs into a spreadsheet is a crucial next step for organization, but it's premature without knowing what criteria you're auditing against. Collecting engagement metrics from social media is part of the data collection phase, which also comes after defining objectives, as these metrics need to be evaluated in the context of specific goals.