How to Conduct Your Own Twitter Audit for Free (in 6 Easy Steps)

Twitter has been an important forum for marketing for over a decade. Whether you try to jump on the latest trending stories, create your own, or employ some other strategy, Twitter is a fast-paced place to engage with customers. Depending on what’s trending, you can spend quite a lot of time interacting with people and delivering relevant solutions.

Despite its reputation as a great place to exert your social media strategy, tweeting must be deliberate and intentional. Every once in a while you’ll want to walk away from your tweeting and take a fresh look at your Twitter strategy. That’s where Twitter audits come in: A way to infrequently but regularly (I do mine once a quarter) check on the health of your Twitter marketing strategy. Here’s how you can conduct your own social media audit without hiring an expensive consultant to glean valuable insights for you.s

What is a Twitter Audit?

A Twitter audit is a simple review of the important aspects of your Twitter account. You should perform this type of content strategy review on a regular basis to ensure alignment with your marketing strategy. This means reviewing your Tweets to see how they fit into the overall picture you are working to create.

There will always be sudden changes reflected in your Tweets, but you’re looking for an overall pattern that you can detect–and that your Twitter followers will also detect. You’ll also need to ensure that the people who follow you (and vice versa) match up. Branding and competitor’s Twitter accounts should also be considered to make sure that your social media strategy is up to snuff.

How to Conduct a Twitter Audit

Here are the exact steps to take when conducting your Twitter audit. I typically suggest that you do these steps in order. With that being said, comparisons with competitors can be done more than once, or at different stages of your overall Twitter audit process to further inform your engagement metrics and expectations. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that your Twitter account matches your objectives well and compares well with those of your competitors. Being left behind at any point can create a significant disadvantage.

1. Confirm Your Twitter Marketing Objective

Your first task in a Twitter audit is always to think about your goals. Are you looking for more conversions? Website traffic? Engagement on your content? Depending on what objective(s) you have, it should shape the perspective from which you conduct your audit. There can be more than one goal, of course.

In some situations, your goals might change throughout the year. While it represents unusual market conditions, the COVID shutdowns are a great example of this. Businesses went from primary sales goals of bringing people into the store to wrestling online shopping dollars. Likewise, virtual events replaced most in-person meetings. Goals are more commonly changed from one year to the next, however, barring special circumstances.

Part of your Twitter objective should be to represent changes in your business. Be especially aware of your newest or trending products and services and make sure they are being represented in your content. This means that, for instance, if you release a new product or introduce new services, they are adequately reflected in your marketing plans and this type of content is featured regularly.

2. Audit Your Branding

Even though most companies don’t change branding often, it always makes sense to make sure that your branding is still aligned with your corporate strategy. Typically, corporate branding is partially a reflection of target consumer bases. Brands tailored to young and hip audiences, for instance, will have that vibe. If the customer base changes, branding may need a refresh. Another example can include the use of symbols that have taken on new meanings over time.

Cover Image

This aspect of a Twitter audit includes looking at and potentially revising several different elements. Look at your cover image and logo. Is it still aligned with your current branding? Even minor things like color shifts should be updated on your Twitter account. Remember: consistency is important to successful branding.

Profile Photo

Profile photos, like branding colors and images, can shift and change to accommodate changes in your branding or goals. An informal photo, for instance, may have worked well when your brand was small and intimate, but may not work if you have grown substantially. Audit your profile photo to make sure your at-a-glance Twitter performance is on par.

Bio

Next, look at your bio. Is it still aligned with your current branding, or does it need a shift? This one will not change that often, as the things a company is proud of typically won’t change often.If you have a major ongoing campaign or initiative, however, you might consider showcasing this in your Twitter bio.

Further Reading: 14 Twitter Bio Ideas to Attract More Followers

URL

Within the cover section of your Twitter audit, check out the URL. Many brands simply list their homepage for this. In many cases, a homepage is appropriate. Nonetheless, you should ask yourself, “Is there a strategic link you’d rather lead people to?” 

A contact landing page could be used, or it could be something dedicated to a core initiative. One example that I saw plenty of a few years ago, for instance, was a link to the ways companies were taking care of their employees during the lockdowns.

Your Pinned Tweet

Finally, check your pinned tweet. Does it need replacing? If you’re using the pinned tweet for major corporate announcements, you’ll likely change it regularly. Another pandemic-era Twitter profile feature was pinned tweets detailing when a business was reopening. This is a more fluid example than might be typical, but it’s a good example of why we need to pay attention to this particular item and how it may change over a given period of time.

Further Reading: The Five Awesome Twitter Features You Should Use Now

3. Audit Your Followers and Followings

Follower count audits are an important part of a Twitter audit. They help ensure that the people you are following are relevant to your mission. You need to be sure that your followers are, in fact, people you want to reach and not bot accounts or bot followers, or people who do not align with your goals.

While most brands will have innocuous irrelevant followers, some of them can cause problems. For instance, fake followers and trolls can throw your statistics off very quickly. A follower audit, then, can actually save your engagement and success. 

Audit Your Followers and Identify Fake Followers

To audit your followers, use a popular Twitter audit tool such as Twitter Audit to find and then delete potential fake followers. As a general rule, fake followers are accounts without a real person behind them.

They could be so-called “sock puppet” accounts meant to get around their real one being banned, for instance. Fake followers can also be accounts that were set up to manipulate analytics info. Either way, you don’t want them around, and a social media analytics tool can help you identify them.

Follow Back Your Important Followers

Make sure that you are following your important followers. If you don’t check this on a daily basis, your Twitter audit is the time to check. Your important followers will vary, but people that seem to be important in your field or that regularly interact with your content should be checked for relevance and followed. While inactive accounts should be removed, active accounts should be rewarded.

Further Reading: Is Your Account Shadowbanned? How to Test for a Twitter Shadowban

Influencers and Brand Advocates

Ask yourself: are there new influencers in your industry who have emerged that you should be following? One of the best ways to get their attention is to follow them. Following influencers lets you see what kind of content they put out, and how effective it is.

Discover your brand advocates and consider introducing them to your influencer program. If you don’t have a good social media dashboard that will help you find them, check out the people who talk about your products and services on Twitter. Many of them would LOVE the opportunity to do this with a sponsorship.

Further Reading: Twitter Influencers: How to Find and Connect with Them

Monitor Your Growth Rate

A Twitter audit should include an analysis of the growth rate of your followers. Twitter analytics will provide you this information and even let you know on a Tweet-by-Tweet basis which Tweets caused you to gain or lose followers.

This information is also included in many social media dashboards. The idea, though, is that if you are trying to attract your target audience to follow you, you want to make sure your follower growth is strong. If not, you will need to determine why you are not attracting the Twitter followers you hope to.

4. Examine Your Tweets

Once you’ve set benchmarks from a strategic standpoint, it’s time to begin your Twitter audit. Begin with data from Google Analytics to see how Twitter traffic is performing from a content and conversion perspective. Typically, this includes a careful look at how often people share or comment on your Tweets. Google Analytics will show you to what extent people click through to the landing pages included in your Tweets.

Next, download Tweets from your Twitter Analytics so that you can analyze them using all of the rich data that Twitter provides. This data is different from Google’s, though some of it is repetitive. Duplicate information can be easily counted just once, and Twitter is better at reporting on a per-Tweet level. Google is more interested in the source of a referral.

Tweet Performance in Terms of Engagement Rates

When analyzing your tweets, look for outliers in both good and bad performing tweets (based on your objective) to optimize your content category or content type (link / meme / video / photo / etc,) strategy.

If you find that a particular type of Tweet has poor engagement rates, you should try and figure out why. For instance, a joke meme might rub people the wrong way here but the same content might perform better on other social media platforms. Likewise, with great Tweets, you want to figure out what’s so awesome about it. These are the Tweets that go viral.

Hashtags

Your Twitter audit should also consider hashtag performance as well as look for trends in timing of tweets. Ask yourself: did certain days or times work better? Do your hashtags adequately reflect what people are looking for in your niche? Are you competing for hashtags that are either too broad or too busy? Vanity metrics are nothing if the hashtags you are using are not actually promoting your brand. 

Evergreen Tweets

Finally, modify your evergreen tweet strategy based on category performance. While evergreen Tweets are intended to be timeless, sometimes you don’t achieve that result. World events can make a once-evergreen piece of content irrelevant, at least for a time. We’ve seen a lot of that over the last few years.

Further Reading: Why Evergreen Tweets are Critical to Twitter Marketing Success

Publishing Frequency 

The frequency with which you post can help determine whether or not you have genuine followers who are eager to engage with your content. Audit your publishing frequency, and determine if you need to publish more or less frequently by assessing the quality of your Tweet engagement, and your profile visits. 

The Best Day and Time to Post

In addition to auditing your number of Tweets per day, consider auditing the best day and time to post, according to your engagement numbers. By auditing your posts, you can determine the day of the week and the time of the day that best suits your Twitter strategy. 

5. Compare with Your Competitors

It’s always smart to see if you are “keeping up with the Joneses” by comparing Tweet frequency, Tweet content type, content category, and engagement they are receiving to yours. Generally speaking, it’s easy to see these statistics if you use social listening tools. Other marketing suites can give you statistics on any Twitter account that you want. These can be personal, such as for influencer searches, or business accounts.

If you track competitor performance regularly, you’ll want to either be outperforming your competitor or looking for insight as to how you can improve your Twitter marketing. While some differences will be reflected in brand voice, others are an overall gauge of effectiveness. Some fashion brands are known for being offbeat, and their clothing line reflects this. If an old-fashioned brand copies them, it won’t “fit” brand voice. An audit can reveal issues in strategy. 

Once you’ve decided how your Twitter analytics compare to the competition “all other things being equal,” it’s time to figure out which items need improvement. Here, you need to consider maximizing both brand exposure and campaign ROI. You should think about how to address the successes of your competition and bring in more consumer interest.

Further Reading: The Best 15 Twitter Tools for Marketing

6. Create a Comprehensive Twitter Audit Report and Adjust Strategy Regularly

I have developed my strategic checklist of items to go over in each and every Twitter audit. I have perfected this list for my own audits, and am confident these items will work well for your audit needs, as well. 

When you conduct regular audits–taking a close look at your followers, your post frequency and timing, your competitors, your branding, and your goals and objectives–you are able to keep a close eye on how effective your Twitter strategy is. Over time, you can use your audits to consistently deliver the best possible results to your Twitter and enjoy the results of a powerful Twitter marketing practice.

The Final Word on Twitter Audits

At the end of the day, there’s no replacement for a Twitter audit. It may sound like a lot of work, but without it, you’ll have a harder time tracking and maintaining the efficiency of your Tweets over time. Its time-consuming nature makes it impractical to complete more than quarterly. Audit too often, and you’ll both waste staff time and (potentially) miss important trends that take time to develop.

Doing a regular audit should be part of your overall marketing effectiveness monitoring. No matter which social networks you use to reach customers (and you should use several) they all need careful maintenance. Luckily, the process is much easier if you have the right tools. Much of the analytical tasks are highly automated. Besides that, the branding considerations don’t take much time, and the conclusions you draw are virtually priceless to your strategy. 

Do you conduct regular Twitter audits? Let me know in the comments! 

Hero photo by freestocks on Unsplash