Your brand’s online presence influences your business’s overall performance.
Most customers use social media to research a brand, and Twitter is the number one platform for brand discovery.
An average Twitter user follows at least five different companies.
So, your brand’s Twitter presence can be vital in determining how your business is perceived among your prospects.
So, if you haven’t evaluated how your Twitter handle has been performing since its creation, it might be a good time to do it now through a Twitter audit.
But, first…
What Is a Twitter Audit?
A Twitter audit is a comprehensive checkup of your Twitter handle.
As a business, you must have joined Twitter with specific goals, like customer support, online visibility, brand engagement, or something else.
According to statistics, nearly 85% of small to medium-sized firms use Twitter to offer customer support. So it is essential to regularly audit tweets you are receiving on your profile.
A Twitter audit runs a granular diagnosis across the length and breadth of your presence on the micro-blogging website to determine how well your efforts align with these goals.
There are a few things that a Twitter audit must focus. These include:
- A check on the quality of your Twitter following.
- A follow-up on your profile and whether the elements align with the latest branding.
- An identification of the best type of content for your brand.
- A determination of posting frequency, time, etc.
- Reevaluation of your KPIs benchmarks.
- Tracking and calculating important metrics like ROI and whether your investments generate the desired results.
- Identification of flaws and areas of improvement across your Twitter presence.
These are just a few of the many goals of a Twitter audit.
Now, how do you go about doing a Twitter audit?
As dull as it sounds, doing a Twitter audit is surprisingly easy and fun. You’ll discover insights and come across information you never knew existed.
Let’s break it down into six simple steps.
1. Determine Your Twitter Marketing Goals
Part of the purpose of a Twitter Audit is to see whether your Twitter marketing goals are being met.
Therefore, before you can fulfill this purpose, it might help to take a little trip down memory lane and uncover the goals you intended to achieve when you first created your business’s Twitter account.
What goal did you have when you logged on to Twitter business for the first time?
Was it to increase brand awareness and reach?
More web traffic?
Multiplied leads and conversions?
Once you have identified that, it’s time to see whether your current strategies are focused on fulfilling these goals.
2. Identify Your Twitter Audit Goals
Now that you have reminded yourself of the goals behind your Twitter marketing, try and think of why you are conducting a Twitter audit.
A Twitter audit can have multiple outcomes.
It can uncover the flaws in your strategies, highlight areas for improvement, guide future campaigns, etc.
What is it that you want to achieve with your Twitter Audit?
Do you want to see whether your audience aligns with your prospects?
Or are you looking to identify the most resonant type of content?
Or do you want to do it all?
Your Twitter marketing goal will help guide your Twitter audit goal.
For example, if your Twitter marketing objective is to drive brand awareness, you would want to find out, among other things, the kind of tweets that drive the most engagement and garner the most reach during your Twitter audit.
Once you have identified your Twitter audit goal, it’s time to dive in.
3. Audit Your Twitter Profile
Your Twitter profile is the first thing people see when they look your business up on Twitter.
It is your brand’s online representative. Hence, how your profile looks will determine how the audience perceives your brand.
If it looks top-notch, you will win an excellent first impression. However, if your Twitter handle looks outdated and abandoned, at first sight, you will lose your reputation and perhaps a customer as well courtesy of your neglect.
Therefore make sure all the graphics, imagery, and text on your Twitter profile are consistent with your brand’s voice and personality.
Graphic design trends change. Ensure your Twitter profile and cover photos are updated with the latest trends so they don’t look outdated and make your profile look abandoned.
Check out how General Electric’s Twitter profile is relevant to the current trends:
Presenting a brand consistently across the internet can lead to a 33% increase in revenue. Therefore, ensure that your Twitter branding is consistent with all other platforms your business exists on.
Twitter bio is important as well.
This one-line statement summarizes your brand for the audience and is prime real estate.
Capitalize on this space to tell the audience exactly what your brand is.
Remember, you have limited characters, so be creative and develop a phrase that captures your brand’s voice and explains your business to the audience.
Check out how Wendy’s does their Twitter bio just right:
There is another prime real estate space on your Twitter handle apart from the bio. And that is your pinned tweet section.
Pinned tweets are relatively new and offer an excellent opportunity to push important brand messages to your prospects.
If you use pinned tweets, ensure they are current with the present trends.
And if you are not yet using the pinned tweets section, what are you waiting for!
Twitter’s pinned tweets get significant exposure to a brand’s target audience. You can use this space to deliver important messages to your audience, like news and updates, deals and discounts, new product launches, etc.
Check out how Target is winning the back-to-school season with this pinned tweet:
Make sure whatever it is that your pinned tweet promotes ties back to your Twitter marketing goals.
If your goal is to drive brand awareness, ensure the pinned tweet does that. If the goal is to get more web traffic from Twitter, make sure the pinned tweet shares one of your most enticing blog posts or offers.
Until this step, you don’t need to dive into data or any data analytics tools. You can perform your profile’s audit manually but what comes next needs analytics.
4. Dive Into Data
One of the most significant advantages of social media is the amount of data they generate.
Twitter is no different.
Your activity on the platform leads to loads of valuable data being generated and gathered in your Twitter analytics dashboard.
This diverse data gives you insights into many key metrics, from the number of followers to top tweets, the best time to post on Twitter, and your audience demographics.
If your goal is to drive engagement and Twitter data tells you certain types of tweets generate high engagement rates, you know what to post to fulfill your marketing objectives.
This is how Twitter analytics can help you get closer to your marketing goals. You can leverage its data to guide your content creation strategy, posting schedule and more.
You can also track your growth using Twitter analytics.
This tool helps you determine how many followers you have gained over a specific period. Moreover, you can also find out the type of content that has led to the most increase in followers.
Empowered with this data, you can make better decisions for your twitter journey, develop efficient strategies, and work to accomplish your Twitter goals.
You can access your Twitter analytics from your account, download all the data to your computer, and create reports.
5. Twitter Followers Audit
If you have never had a Twitter audit, chances are your handle has attracted a bunch of meaningless, perhaps even fake, followers that don’t add any value to your business.
Who are meaningless and fake followers?
A meaningless follower could be anyone who doesn’t align with your target audience persona.
The reason you exist on Twitter is to connect with your target audience. But if your followers don’t match the target audience demographics, will your Twitter efforts be worth anything? No.
Similarly, the trend of bot followers is on the rise.
Brands often attract many fake followers that are bot accounts. Social media platforms often crack down on business profiles with an abundance of such accounts.
Therefore, before you celebrate your increase in follower count, perform a Twitter follower audit to weed out fake and meaningless followers.
Your Twitter analytics report would contain information about your followers’ demographics, age, location, etc. Match this information with your buyer persona and see if it aligns.
If it doesn’t, it’s time to revamp your follower acquisition strategy to reach and attract people who matter.
You may also have to dive manually into your followers and see if the accounts align with your target audience persona to determine if the right kind of audience is following you.
Additionally, your analytics report will also tell you whether your followers have increased or decreased over a given period. This will help you identify the impact your marketing activities are generating.
Auditing Twitter followers also means identifying your top, most influential followers and engaging with them to make them your brand advocates.
6. Audit Your Twitter Content
A Twitter content audit involves an assessment of all your tweets to see which are the most successful.
Check out the performance insights of all the tweets that went live during the chosen audit period.
Determine what kind of tweets drove the most KPIs.
Was it the meme content you shared that got the most retweets or the deal you posted that got the most web traffic?
Whatever tweet content brings you closer to your Twitter marketing objectives, do more of that.
If infographics drive better engagement, share more infographics and put video content on hold if that doesn’t perform too well.
A content audit will also uncover the ideal length of your tweets, posting frequency, and the best time to post a tweet.
Dig into your analytics and see if there’s a trend in best-performing tweets.
Were all these high-performing tweets posted at any particular time of the day? If so, this could be your best time to post on Twitter.
Finally, dig up some of your old tweets and see if they are still relevant or consistent with the brand. If not, consider deleting them to ensure your handle brims with valuable and fresh content.
The Value of Twitter and Twitter Audit
Twitter has around 217 million monetizable daily active users. But more things make Twitter a lucrative platform for brands.
Twitter sees almost 6000 tweets every second!
This makes it an excellent platform for brands to dip into their customers’ conversations, gain valuable insights, and become part of the latest trends.
Taco Bell is a great example of getting the best of conversations on Twitter.
The food chain adopted an approach of engaging its followers in comical conversations. As a result of this approach, the brand now has more than a million followers on Twitter alone.
So, Twitter is invaluable for brands. But only those brands manage to leverage their true potential that keeps up with Twitter audits.
Businesses hop on Twitter to engage their audience and ultimately win more conversions.
However, with all the trends and the race to increase followers and gain reach, it is easy to lose sight of your main goal and become distracted by these vanity metrics that contribute little to a brand’s progress. As a result of losing focus, your content quality and engagement suffer.
Consequently, what happens is that you continue to make efforts on Twitter but see no encouraging or appreciable results.
Twitter audit cuts this destructive cycle right at the start and helps you identify if your efforts are actually helping you get closer to your real goals or just helping you gain floozy, empty metrics.
Twitter is a goldmine for brands that manage to use it right. A Twitter audit enables you to harness the platform’s true potential, streamline your efforts, and focus on creating content that matters.
Conclusion
A Twitter audit helps you run a diagnosis on your Twitter profile to identify underlying issues restricting your growth and discover new opportunities.
This is why, when done right, a Twitter audit can help enhance your brand’s Twitter presence and propel your business toward success.
A Twitter audit, however, is not a one-time thing. You will need to perform regular audits to keep harnessing its potential and capitalizing on the microblogging website’s benefits.
Therefore, develop a routine of regular Twitter audits to continue optimizing your Twitter marketing campaigns and vying for more resounding results.
