Performing a Twitter audit may not be your favorite task as a marketer, but it is still something you have to check off your list.
Don't worry. When you see all the data you need about your Twitter performance in one unified dashboard, the picture will become more clear.
This way, you will finally be able to see what’s rotten and what needs to be changed to obtain greater results on social media.
We are here to guide through a complete Twitter audit for your brand. Take a deep breath, put on your reading glasses and lay back. Your work is about to get easier.
Let’s dive in!
How to conduct a Twitter audit
2.What's the purpose of a Twitter audit?
3.How to do a Twitter audit, step by step
- Take a look at your profile
- Analyze your tweets
- Check your Twitter publishing strategy
- Learn more about your audience
- Check who you’re following
- Re-evaluate your strategy
- Boost your Twitter audit score
1. What is a Twitter audit?
Twitter has seen its fair share of chance of changes over the last few years.
Regardless of its many leadership and algorithm changes, sticking to a certain pattern for your posts is certainly a successful thing. This social media channel is the place where opinions and debates are flying at the fastest speed.
A thorough analysis like a Twitter audit helps you see how your brand is performing, determine if you’re moving in the right direction, and uncover your weaknesses.
2. What's the purpose of a Twitter audit?
It’s good practice to constantly analyze your efforts and strategies. This is why conducting a social media audit every once in a while is an excellent idea.
Marketers perform these analyses monthly, quarterly or yearly, depending on their clients’ requests.
Here are some of the benefits of social media audit for Twitter:
- see what are the most liked, commented and retweeted tweets
- review your strategy - you might bring back old ideas if they've worked in the past
- see what tweets no longer comply with your strategy, tone of voice or brand values
- weed out fake followers - quality trumps quality
3. How to do a Twitter audit, step by step
If you got this far, it is clear that you want to conduct a Twitter audit and you need this step-by-step guide to do things right.
First, you should start exactly where most of your audience does, by looking at your Twitter profile. Your brand logo, header photo and profile photo should be aligned.
Also make sure you keep in mind the required dimensions for each image. Your profile photo should be 400 x 400 pixels, while your header should have 1500 x 500 pixels.
Make sure your Twitter bio is not just an empty space. Use those 160 characters responsibly to attract the right people from the start.
And yes, people really do read social media bios. At least I do. Your bio should explain what your brand’s about and how it can help prospective clients.
If you have some pinned Tweets check to see what they are about, and remove those which are no longer relevant. Maybe you have more recent posts about your latest accomplishments or updates.
The next thing you should look at are your tweets. The tone of voice you use and the type of content you spread can tell a lot about your brand.
One of your main interests is to develop your own trademark when it comes to writing. Since the length of posts is quite limited (4000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers but only 280 characters for non-paying users), make sure you use the right words to deliver your message.
Then assess the type of content you use. There is a wide range of post types you can choose from. You can test them all and then analyze which ones are performing better to know where your focus should be.
Better yet, check which post type performs best on Twitter using Socialinsider. To do that, you need to connect your Twitter account and head to your Twitter analytics dashboard.
Once you get there, you'll be greeted by some very friendly key metrics - the number of tweets published in your selected timeframe, engagement, follower growth and average engagement rate.
These are some of the most important Twitter metrics you should keep an eye on.
But that's not all (obviously). Scrolling down, you can discover even more insights about your Tweets.
For instance, you can find out which tweet type performs best on your profile.
Or what are your top tweets (by engagement) for the selected time range:
To dig deeper into your posts performance, navigate to the Tweets newsfeed. Here, you can play around with the sorting options available, which will organize your list by the metric you choose.
When it comes to filtering, you can choose to display only one post type (tweets, replies, retweets, quote retweets, image, video, status) or all of them.
Hashtags are still very important on Twitter, so it's essential to keep an eye on your most popular hashtags and include them in your Twitter audit.
Here's where you can see them in Socialinsider:
As soon as you figure out what type of posts perform better for your brand, you should think about the frequency of posting.
We all know that on other social media platforms the information flow is slower and you do not even need to post on a daily basis. However, with Twitter it’s a different story.
The frequency of posting on this channel is several tweets per day, ranging from 5 to 10 tweets or even more.
Depending on your brand’s policy and the industry you activate in, your number of daily posts can vary.
You can also see the distribution of tweets for a chosen time range in Socialinsider. The average tweets/day metric is a good indicator of your average posting frequency:
Replies are a big part of your posting activity on Twitter, so you can also track this aspect in Socialinsider:
Finding out what your audience prefers, what are their interests and opinions could really help you build a strong community.
You can learn more about your buyer persona and how to transforma leads into partnerships.
First, you have to check your follower growth and engagement to understand your audience’s behavior. Those show you how much people appreciate your brand.
What matters is to attract the relevant audience. By using Socialinsider, you can get granular data about your followers.
Not only your audience matters, but it is also important who you are following. Now is the time to find out which of the accounts you are following are fake ones.
Some of them may have fooled you into believing they are real people. Even if this may take a lot of time since it’s a manual job, you need the patience to do it.
Unfollow those accounts that seem sketchy and keep only those you are really interested in. Maybe you follow other companies in your industry or maybe you have some inspiration sources there.
Keep only the accounts that reflect your brand’s interests.
After you have performed your Twitter audit, you need to jot down some conclusions.
What have you accomplished so far?
How much did your brand evolve since your last audit? How does it stack up against industry benchmarks? What’s your next move?
If you have an answer for all of these, then you surely did a great job and you clearly know how to organize your next marketing strategy.
Developing a new strategy after conducting an audit will help you get the sense of a fresh start.
Be bold and adopt new ideas and types of posts that could also inspire others.
Now that you’ve gathered all the valuable insights about your brand’s Twitter account, it is time to consider a list of improvements to make. An action plan, if you will.
Don’t hesitate to delete all activity that no longer defines your brand, and write down those tweets that really worked wonders.
Use all of the information in order to improve your future Twitter strategies. That includes your current followers.
We all know how hard it is to attract followers and it’s even harder to engage with the ones that are genuinely interested in your company’s activity and willing to engage.
Despite Twitter regulations, there are many ways to acquire fake followers with accounts made by bots. And it can be tempting.
But building a reputation on fake numbers is not a good idea in the long term. There’s power in numbers, but there’s more power in engagement numbers. And fake followers can’t help with that.
Because fake accounts are almost everywhere, it shouldn’t be surprising if your account is followed by some. To put it in perspective, half of Elon Musk's followers are fake.
By removing the fake followers, you make sure your messages only reach the people that matter and might be real leads for your business.
Inevitably, the engagement rates of your posts will grow, as well as your Twitter audit.
4. How to spot fake followers on Twitter
Fake Twitter followers are a thing and many businesses try to keep themselves away from them.
Unfortunately, these fake followers are inevitable since you cannot always check all the details.
If you are trying to separate fake followers on Twitter from the real ones, here are a few things you should check:
- Profile picture - A bot or a fake Twitter account avoids choosing a profile picture or they may use a generic one, probably a picture stolen from Google.
- Bio - If the Twitter bio has no data, then something must be fishy. Users generally describe themselves in their bio, writing about their jobs and passions. A fake twitter account or a bot may not complete the bio in detail.
- Twitter handles - If the account name does not match the Twitter handle, then you know that is not a real person.
- Engagement level - Even if you may see bigger numbers, fake followers do not actually add value to your business’ account.
- Unrealistic follower count - An unrealistic number of followers is also something that should make you become suspicious about the legitimacy of a Twitter account.
- Duplicate or generic tweets - Generic tweets or those which seem to be duplicates in the different conversations, it is clear that the Twitter account you’re looking at is not a real one.
Alternatively, you can use a tool like followerAudit to check how many of your brand's Twitter followers are legitimate and how many are fake:
5. Twitter audit tools to use in 2023
To help you get into the nitty-gritty of a Twitter audit, you will most likely need a bit of help digging through all the data.
Here is when Twitter audit tools come in handy. There is a wide range of analytics tools on the market that could help you with your account’s audit.
Here’s a list of the most useful tools you can use to spot bot-generated accounts:
- Socialinsider is an advanced analytics tool that offers granular data and insightful charts about your Twitter performance which you can use to perform your Twitter audit.
- TwitterAudit takes 5K accounts samples and it’s said to have one of the best accuracy rates to detect bots.
- Union Metrics is a complete analytics solution which offers you the right amount of data to start your audit.
- Tweepi is a free tool that finds you the fake accounts for you. However,  you can’t delete them using the tool and you have to do it manually.
- SocialPilot can help you increase engagement and categorize your tweets.
- SparkToro audits a sample of 2K followers for and runs diagnostics found to strongly correlate with these types of fake followers.
However, tools will only get you so far, especially depending on the budget you have attributed to your Twitter marketing.
It’s up to you to ultimately make sure you set and live up the standards of your account.
Find more Twitter tools that can help your marketing game!
Final thoughts
Learning how to perform a social media audit should be one of every marketer’s core skills. This way, they will periodically assess the performance of the brand, finding out when it’s time to change the strategy.
Now that you know how to do a proper Twitter audit, it’s time to conduct the first one.
Remember to save your results and compare them with the following ones.
