← All projects

Social Audit · 2025

PlayStation, Social Media Audit

An end-to-end social audit of PlayStation's owned channels, what's working, what's repetitive, where the brand is leaving share-of-voice on the table to Xbox and Nintendo.

Client

Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation (Brand Strategy Study)

Industry

Gaming · Entertainment

Role

Social Strategist & Auditor

Year

2025

Cinematic dim room with PlayStation controller on a coffee table, TV glowing blue and magenta from a racing game.

Case Study · 23

"PlayStation owns the announcement, Xbox owns the community reply, Nintendo owns the personality. The fastest unlock for PlayStation wasn't another launch post, it was building a 'between-launches' content pillar with creator voices and player POV."

Objective

Pressure-test PlayStation's social presence against its main competitors and recommend two or three specific moves the team could ship without a new agency.

Result

A multi-platform audit covering Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn, with content-pillar analysis, posting cadence, engagement benchmarks against Xbox and Nintendo, and prioritized recommendations.

Deliverables

  • ·Channel-by-channel audit (IG, TikTok, X, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn)
  • ·Competitive benchmark vs Xbox and Nintendo
  • ·Content pillar + cadence analysis
  • ·Engagement and growth metrics summary
  • ·Prioritized recommendations and quick wins

Skills applied

Social media auditCompetitive analysisContent pillar definitionEngagement benchmarking

01

Challenge

PlayStation's social was visually consistent but tonally flat, dropping launches without much narrative connective tissue between them. The audit had to separate the brand-safe baseline from the genuine missed swings.

02

Insight

PlayStation owns the announcement, Xbox owns the community reply, Nintendo owns the personality. The fastest unlock for PlayStation wasn't another launch post, it was building a 'between-launches' content pillar with creator voices and player POV.

03

Strategy

  • Score each channel against pillar coverage, cadence, and engagement quality (not just volume).
  • Benchmark each platform separately, IG vs IG, TikTok vs TikTok, not aggregate.
  • Recommend a small set of 'between-launches' formats the team could test inside the next sprint.

04

Execution

  • Audited PlayStation's top posts across five platforms for a 90-day window.
  • Benchmarked side-by-side against Xbox and Nintendo on engagement rate, comments-to-likes ratio and reply cadence.
  • Wrote the recommendations as a stack-ranked list with the smallest credible test for each.

05

Outcome

  • A clean 'where we lead, where we lag' artifact the brand team could share internally without translation.
  • A specific 'between-launches' content pillar recommendation tied to creator collabs.

06

Key Learnings

  • Audits are most useful when the recommendation fits in a single slide.
  • Per-platform benchmarking beats aggregate, the lesson is in the gaps between channels, not the average.

07

What I Would Do Next

  • Pilot the 'between-launches' creator pillar for 60 days and re-audit.
  • Add a comments-quality dimension (not just count) to the benchmark.

Next case study

Duolingo, Social Media Show & Tell

Duolingo (Brand Strategy Study)