Regardless of whether you’re still figuring out how to use Twitter to boost your business, or you’re already doing well but are looking for ways to up your game, you’ll love this quick Twitter audit guide that will show you how to assess and improve your Twitter profile in less than 30 minutes.
With the end of this quarter fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about expanding your potential and making the next quarter more successful for your business.
This means that it’s time for you to:
- Start reflecting on what you did right and what could be done better in your business, and…
- Develop new strategies to drive positive change and better results.
A quick Twitter audit will enable you to achieve just that – understand what works for your business and how you could improve your social activity to increase engagement, boost your follower count and improve your conversion rates.
What is a Twitter Audit and Why Does it Matter?
A Twitter audit is an assessment of your Twitter account and overall performance.
A quick Twitter analysis like this will help you better understand your audience, fine-tune your content strategy, stay consistent and determine ways you can improve your online presence and return on investment.
Twitter audits should be done frequently – at least once every quarter – and they are fairly fast and easy to do.
Let’s jump right into the “How”.
Set Your Goals
Before you start with the actual audit, you need to define what success means for you and what you are hoping to get out of your Twitter activity.
Generally speaking, Twitter is best for raising brand awareness and providing timely customer service, but your goals will depend on your current business situation and your overall social media strategy.
Read more on how you can develop a full blown social media strategy that works for you.
Start With Your Profile
Your profile determines your visitors’ first impression about your business.
Auditing your profile will help you ensure that you make a great first impression and that your visitors understand what your business is about and what you provide in terms of value.
Auditing your profile comes down to updating three elements: your Twitter bio, your Twitter profile pictures and your pinned tweet.
A good Twitter bio is short, clear and concise. Avoid using vague phrases and marketing buzzwords, and just explain what you do as you would to a friend.
You only have a couple of seconds to capture your visitor’s attention before they click away so make sure that you use simple language and a clear statement that shows the value you can provide.
Your bio may be good already, but go over it one more time to make sure that all details are correct and up to date.
Audit your Twitter profile pictures to make sure that your branding is consistent across all online channels. Update your profile photo to the latest logo of your company – your profile picture size should be at least 400 x 400 pixels.
Also, update your header image (1,500 x 500 pixels) so that it matches your company’s messaging.
You can use the header to reinforce your brand, promote a new product, or make an announcement.
Upon rebranding a couple of months ago, we decided to use our header image to increase brand awareness among our visitors and followers.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s header image is all about his personal brand as well.
As you can see, you can get creative with your header image – it’s social media and people are here for informal conversations after all!
Another thing that visitors see immediately upon landing on your profile is your pinned tweet – which is why we included this point in the “Profile Audit” section instead of the “Tweet Audit” section.
Pinned tweets are tweets that appear on the top of your profile for as long as you don’t unpin them or pin another tweet.
At Keyhole, we usually use the pinned tweet to promote new content or to make an important announcement, like we did with our big rebranding a couple of months ago.
You can use your pinned tweet for different purposes:
To announce a new initiative…
To promote a new story…
To promote a new product…
… or to inform about a current campaign.
Smart Bird Social have published a great piece on the reasons why you should consider pinning tweets to the top of your profile.
Audit Your Twitter Audience
The next thing you want to look at is your audience.
The audience audit is a crucial step since it helps you understand the kind of people that follow you and this serves two purposes.
- It will help you create a better content creation strategy and publish content that this audience is interested in seeing.
- It will help you see if you’re on the right path and if you’re doing everything right to attract the audience that will help you achieve your goals.
The Twitter audience audit is done in two steps.
STEP 1: Understand Who Your Audience Is
The first thing you need to do is understand what you audience is about and what their interests are.
This will help you determine the kind of content that would resonate best with them, and in turn, increase your Twitter impressions, engagement rate, and will ultimately help you lose less followers and increase your following.
Thankfully this is easy to do and all you need to do is to get on Twitter analytics and check the audiences tab.
Here, you’ll be able to see your audience demographics, their top interests, gender distribution, as well as the change in your follower numbers for the past 30 days.
This should give you a general idea of the kind of audience your content resonates with.
STEP 2. Check For Bots
Once you know your audience, you want to check how many of your followers are real people.
Chances are your profile has at least some percentage of bot followers.
Think you’re an exception?
In 2018, Twiplomacy published a list featuring the world leaders and their fake followers as calculated by Twitter Audit.
This shows you that no one is immune to bots.
To do a quick audit of your own account, go to https://www.twitteraudit.com/ and enter your username.
Now, here’s the thing.
Fake followers can’t harm your account per se, and you can’t do much about your fake followers (unless you want to pay to have them removed).
What this audit will help you do is understand where you stand in terms of your actual following and will also help you determine your real engagement rate.
STEP 3. Find Your Top Followers
If you want to step the Audience audit a step further, you can also perform a more advanced analysis and find out who your top followers are.
You can easily do this using a social listening tool that allows you to track hashtags and monitor conversations and use these insights to connect with influential and engaging followers.
SUGGESTED READ: The Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools
Audit Your Tweets
The next step is to audit your tweets and evaluate your performance.
Log in to your native Twitter analytics dashboard and select the Tweets tab. Here you can select a date range of your preference, and you’ll be shown a breakdown of your activity within your selected time frame.
This report will show you your Tweet activity, including your top tweets, your tweets and replies, as well as the impressions and engagement rate next to each one of your tweets.
On the right-hand side, you’ll be able to see the number of likes, replies and link clicks you’ve acquired during this period as well.
Click the export data button to download a CSV of the report.
This report should give you a clear idea of what’s landing well with your audience and how you can optimize and improve your activity for maximum engagement.
If you want to get down to the nitty gritty…
You can also use an analytics tool like Keyhole to track keywords, monitor social conversations and learn more about your audience and how they feel about your brand.
This will help you understand what’s working for your target segment and identify patterns that will ultimately help you optimize your strategy and create more engaging tweets and stories that resonate with your audience.
SUGGESTED READ: The Ultimate Sentiment Analysis Guide
Another reason why you might want to consider using a third-party tool to audit your account is that the native Twitter analytics app will show you a performance report limited to a narrow time window.
Keyhole allows you to export your data in any custom time range you choose and see trends, events and overall performance on particular days or create robust reports for a longer time period.
Performing a Twitter audit is a quick and easy activity that can ultimately determine your Twitter success and how well your message resonates with your audience.
The key in performing a successful Twitter audit is to make quarterly Twitter check-ins part of your routine.
This is the easiest way to evaluate your performance: quarterly Twitter audits will allow for a timely response to industry trends and your audience’s changing requirements – all this without being overwhelmed by the amounts of available data.
SUGGESTED READ: Twitter Analytics: A Guide to Drive Traffic and Boost Sales
If you haven’t done a Twitter audit until now, go ahead and schedule some time to see where you stand.
You’ll be able to make informed decisions about how you can make next quarter’s social strategy better and more lucrative for your business.
Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram.
