Call it X or Twitter; it is a social media platform that no business can afford to miss. While many things have changed on the platform in the past year, engagements have been at an all-time high. If you want your business account to take a piece of the pie, it is time for a Twitter audit.
Studies show that 80% of Twitter users follow a brand and that Twitter Ads can reach up to 339.6 million people. The platform holds huge potential for businesses looking to build a dedicated community. However, figuring out what works and why your content has been missing the mark can be challenging.
This blog post is your guide to conducting an efficient Twitter audit and taking steps to elevate your Twitter marketing strategies.
Table of contents
What is a Twitter audit?
A Twitter audit is the process of reviewing your Twitter account’s performance to determine whether it’s meeting social media and brand goals and expectations. Your audit must include a deep dive into your profile setup, tweets, follower growth, and engagement rates.
With an effective Twitter audit, you can evaluate your performance against industry benchmarks, identify well-performing content, scope for improvement, fake followers, and set appropriate goals for your future Twitter marketing campaigns.
Businesses can manually audit Twitter or use third-party social media management tools to analyze their accounts.
Why is a Twitter audit important?
A regular Twitter audit helps businesses set the right marketing goals and marketing KPIs, run targeted campaigns to improve ROI, gauge customer sentiment, and revise marketing strategy based on the audit results.
Let us take a closer look at the benefits of a Twitter audit:
Goal setting and KPIs
The key to a successful campaign is knowing its limits by setting the right goals and identifying the correct marketing KPIs to measure. For example, if you don’t audit your Twitter profile, you may end up setting a metric of 10000 follower count increase. If your account is only growing by 500 or so followers, it would be impossible to achieve this goal, setting your team up for failure.
However, if you know the current follower growth rate and the content that made it possible, you can choose an achievable goal and work effectively towards it.
Improve ROI
If your business invests in advertising campaigns on Twitter, it is important to know your current target audience’s demographic, top-performing content, top-performing advertising formats in your niche, and more to maximize your ROI.
Auditing your Twitter content and running a competitor analysis can help you easily identify these key elements.
Revise strategy
Just devising a content plan and hoping that it works is not a sustainable approach. Analyzing past performance and taking a holistic look at your Twitter account is more likely to help you choose the right marketing strategy.
Conducting a Twitter audit midway through a campaign can also be helpful to course-correct and achieve the desired results.
Gauge customer sentiment
Twitter is a popular platform for consumers to voice their opinions on popular topics, interact with brands, and share their feedback on business interactions. Auditing your Twitter mentions, replies, direct messages (DMs), and overall engagement rates can provide a keen insight into overall consumer sentiment on the platform.
6 effective steps to conduct a Twitter audit
Conducting a Twitter audit involves thoroughly reviewing your branding, follower growth, content marketing strategy, and engagement metrics and adjusting your strategy accordingly for the best results.
This section explores each step in detail so that you can understand your Twitter profile better. i
Check out our free social media audit template !!
Twitter branding audit
The first step in getting started with a Twitter audit is to check if your Twitter business account accurately represents your business. Everything a potential customer needs to know must be easy to locate, right from the first look at your Twitter profile.
The things to pay attention to while auditing your Twitter branding are:
- Cover photo: Your Twitter page’s cover photo occupies a lot of real estate, so it must be attractive, engaging, and descriptive. Pick a cover image that talks about your products, services, brand values, or any current events your customers should know. Anything that you feel would help customers connect with your brand must be in that cover photo.
- Profile photo: The profile picture must ideally be your business logo. Make sure that you choose a high-quality image that is well-edited to fit the Twitter image guidelines.
- Brand messaging via bio: Your Twitter bio should tell your customers what they can expect by interacting with your profile. This includes your key values, unique service offerings, your website address, and business/service location.
- Pinned tweets: The Twitter bio is good but not enough to convey everything about your business. Leverage the pinned Tweets feature to highlight your best products, services, press coverage, and customer testimonials.
Twitter follower audit
The next step on the Twitter audit tour is an audit of your follower count, follower growth rate, fake follower count, and a demographic breakdown of your audience.
Follower growth rate
A good measure of your Twitter performance is the rate at which your followers increase over a period of time. Auditing follower growth rate for a longer period can help you spot trends, identify campaigns that contributed to the growth, and also screen for fake followers.
Every social media manager and CMO should know the follower growth rate verbatim, especially if they plan to grow the brand on the platform.
Demographic breakdown
The next step of the audit is to understand who your followers actually are. You can use the built-in Twitter analytics dashboard or use third-party social media management tools to get a demographic breakdown of your audience.
Knowing this detail about your followers can help you choose the right content, devise targeted campaigns, and align your Twitter strategy to business growth goals.
Fake follower analysis
Fake accounts and bot accounts are a significant challenge to businesses trying to genuinely engage users and grow a strong community. That makes it extremely vital for businesses to keep a check on fake followers that may impact their engagement rate.
But how to identify fake followers with a Twitter audit?
If you see a surge of new followers without any campaign to link it to, it could be from fake accounts. A good way to audit Twitter followers and identify fake accounts is to check the following:
- Age of the account: Brand new accounts and very old accounts with no activity are a complete red flag.
- Follower count of the accounts: Bot accounts have very few followers and usually have less than fifty to hundred followers.
- Profile activity: When was the last tweet from this account? Do they have any original content or is the profile filled with sporadic retweets?
- Profile picture and name: Accounts with avatars and keywords in their names are often fake accounts or bots.
Pro Tip: Identifying fake followers manually can be a time consuming task. However, you can use third-party tools to streamline this process and follow it up with a manual verification to authenticate the tool’s results. Verify the legitimacy of the tool before using it as Twitter may impose penalties for using unauthorized tools.
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Twitter content audit
The content you post on Twitter plays the most critical role in your growth. It must tick the following boxes:
- The content format must be popular on Twitter. We recommend using memes, videos, and content threads with engaging graphics for the best results.
- Your content must resonate with your target audience. Research what the competitors are posting, what content generates the most engagement, and what content aligns best with your brand goals.
- The content must align with your overall business objectives. For example, posting memes is good but unless it actually drives brand awareness, or revenue, it does not contribute to social media marketing goals.
What does audit your content mean? – Twitter edition
Auditing Twitter content means analyzing your past content to evaluate its effectiveness, impact, and engagement rates. Additionally, the audit must measure:
- Publishing frequency
- Best performing content
- Link clicks
Correlate these results with engagement reports to devise a successful Twitter marketing strategy.
Twitter engagement audit
The Twitter analytics dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of significant social media metrics such as engagement rates, impressions, and video views to name a few. Measuring engagement rates help uncover trends in audience interactions, identify highs and lows of your Twitter performance, and understand what works best for your audience.
If you manage multiple Twitter accounts for your business, you can also use consumer intelligence/social media analytic tools to audit Twitter engagement comprehensively.
Twitter engagement audit metrics
A few things to know and include in your Twitter audit report are:
- Impressions or views that your Tweets receives
- Reach or the unique users who have viewed your content
- Video views
- Paid campaign metrics such as total ad spend, cost rate, and results rate
- Interactions such as profile clicks, hashtag clicks, likes, and follows
Pro Tip: For instantly identifying fake followers, audit Twitter engagements that seemingly stem from non-branded content or unrelated hashtag clicks.
DMs and response times
Auditing your direct messages from Twitter users and measuring your response times, resolution rate, and so on can help you understand the effectiveness of your business on the platform.
While Twitter does not directly provide this metric, you can use social media management tools like Birdeye to audit your DMs and response rates.
With Birdeye, businesses can measure
- Number of messages received via Twitter
- Messages responded and queries resolved over a period of time
- Resolution rate and response time
Pro Tip: Integrate your Twitter Inbox with a live chat solution to send automated responses, answer frequently asked questions, and never miss a lead.
Twitter sentiment analysis
Take your Twitter audit to the next level by measuring customer sentiment towards your business over the platform. Businesses must invest in social listening and constantly monitor what users are saying of their business across social media platforms. This becomes extremely vital for a platform like Twitter where consumers constantly post grievances surrounding brand interactions.
While there are many ways to do this, one of the easiest ways to do so is to leverage an AI-powered social media management tool like Birdeye.
Birdeye helps businesses use AI to analyze customer messages, reviews, and more to generate quick summaries and gauge overall consumer sentiment.
Conduct a competitor analysis
While a Twitter audit of your profile, you can take it a step further by analyzing the Twitter performance of your direct competitors as well.
Auditing your competitors will help you identify:
- Content gaps in your marketing strategy
- Identify top-performing content ideas for your target audience
- Follower demographics you can target but haven’t yet
- Industry standards for engagement rates, follower growth, and overall branding
Pro Tip: Analyze your competitors’ performance across all social media platforms, review sites, and listing platforms. This will help you understand their brand positioning and set the right tone for your Twitter account as well.
Audit your Twitter accounts to grow faster on the platform
Twitter is a powerful platform and helps businesses identify potential customers and brand advocates to engage and convert. However, that’s not possible without knowing what’s working and not. Without a concrete plan of action, your tweets don’t reach the intended audience and achieve the goals you set out to hit.
That’s where the Twitter audit comes in. It unlocks growth opportunities, helps you choose the right strategy, and refines your advertising campaigns. From an effective Twitter audit, you’ll gain valuable insights into your audience, content strategy, and engagement rates.
So, what are you waiting for? Take control of your Twitter destiny and watch your brand take flight!
Frequently asked questions on Twitter audit
Some common signs of an account being a Twitter bot is their Avatar or simplistic profile picture, profile name with keywords or symbols, and low genuine Twitter activity.
You can get rid of fake followers on Twitter by conducting a Twitter audit and using a third-party tool to remove fake followers directly.
Grow your Twitter profiles with Birdeye
Guaranteeing growth on Twitter just starts with auditing but requires consistent dedication to content creation, user engagement, social media monitoring, and reporting. Why do all this manually when Birdeye can help you streamline social media management with AI-powered solutions?
Our host of services especially facilitate improved social media marketing for multi-location based businesses, managing multiple location-based accounts across various platforms.
Here’s a look at how Birdeye can elevate your Twitter and overall social media game:
- Content creation: No more writing blocks or struggling to fill your content calendar with engaging, relevant, and impactful content. BirdAI helps you generate content ideas, and develop those ideas into Twitter-specific pieces.
- Content management: Create, schedule, and cross-share content across multiple Twitter profiles with just a few clicks. Our comprehensive content calendar has all you need to maintain consistency on Twitter.
- Engagement and monitoring: Create and monitor custom social media feeds to instantly engage with every like, mention, and retweet from a centralized dashboard.
- DM management: Receive, respond, manage, and analyze your Twitter Inbox with our AI-powered communication management platform. Instantly identify potential leads, nurture them with appropriate campaigns, and get instant AI-generated summaries to share with management.
- Reputation management: Boost brand awareness and social media reputation by auto-sharing positive reviews and testimonials on your Twitter accounts.
- Custom reporting: Generate custom dashboard and monitor metrics that your CMO cares about. Ditch generic Twitter audit reports and focus on KPIs that align with your business goals.
Birdeye’s comprehensive social media, reputation, and customer experience management platform helps you go beyond a Twitter audit. Our tools enable you to transform your presence on Twitter with just a few clicks.
Unlock explosive growth and higher conversion rates with Birdeye today!
Watch a free demo to learn more!
Originally published