Just like any digital marketing strategy, you need to check in on your Twitter profile and tactics every now and then to ensure what you’re doing is working. This is why it’s a good idea to perform a quick Twitter audit every quarter or so.
What is a Twitter audit?
A Twitter audit is essentially a quick wellness check of your account. You’re looking over all of the aspects of your brand’s Twitter profile to ensure that you’re up to date on what’s working and what’s not. This includes reviewing how well your content is lining up with your goals, knowing who your follower base and making sure the overall branding of your account is up to date.
How to do a Twitter audit
When conducting a quick 20-minute Twitter audit, you need to first consider your goals. Have they changed since your last refresh?
If so, be conducting this audit with a focus on helping you identify and organize the changes you need to make to align with new goals. If not, you’re basically just taking a look into whether your current efforts are working towards your goals or not.
There are three main parts of a Twitter audit: auditing your tweets, auditing your followers and auditing your profile. We’re going to go through each of these parts step-by-step so that you can do your own Twitter audit.
How to audit your tweets
The first part of your Twitter audit is going to focus on your tweets. Keep in mind that you can customize this process to fit your needs, but these are the steps that we recommend when starting out with your Twitter audit.
Step 1: Gather your tweets
First things first, you need to gather your tweets so that you can do a quick overview all at once without having to scroll up and down your feed.
There are two different ways that you can export all your tweets.
One way is by heading over to Twitter’s analytics.
- Log into your dashboard and select the Tweets tab.
- Set your date range.
- Click “Export data.”
Twitter will download a spreadsheet with details like engagement, stats for your promoted Tweets and more.
And if you’re auditing multiple accounts (i.e., your brand’s main account plus customer support account), you’ll have to do this for each one and then combine them into a single spreadsheet.
The second option is to use Sprout Social.
One of the biggest benefits of using Sprout is that you can access data for all your profiles in an instant. This prevents you from having to export reports for each profile one by one. Sprout also allows you to put everything into one single spreadsheet.
Here’s how to extract your Twitter data with Sprout:
- Open your Sprout Social dashboard and navigate to the reports tab.
- Click on your Sent Message Performance report.
- Choose the publishing period that you want to analyze.
- Select the Twitter account and type(s) of messages (Tweets, Retweets With Comment, DMs)
- Click Export. You can choose to export a PDF or CSV.
I recommend exporting as a CSV so that you can easily organize and categorize the information throughout the audit.
The information provided in your CSV from Sprout includes:
- The date and time each tweet was sent
- The type of message (Tweet, Retweet With Comment, DM)
- The profile for each tweet
- Which team member sent the tweet
- A link to the tweet on Twitter
- Message
- Potential reach
- Responses
- Clicks
- Organic impressions
- Likes
- Retweets
- Replies
Your Sprout spreadsheet is especially helpful if there are multiple people sending tweets on your company’s behalf, because it showcases who was the author of each tweet.
Now that you’ve gathered your tweet data, it’s time to move onto the next step!
Step 2: Review your activity
Now that you have your tweets in one place, you can review how well you’ve been executing on your strategy. How often have you been tweeting over the publishing period that you’re analyzing? Check the dates to see what your posting schedule looks like. Do you need to be tweeting more or less frequently?
You also need to pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t.
Organize your spreadsheet to showcase which tweets get the highest potential reach, organic impressions, responses, retweets and likes.
Then note what tweets perform best. Take a look at:
- The type of post: What’s getting the most attention on your account: pictures, video, links to your content? See what common themes emerge.
- Copy: Are you getting a lot of responses to tweets that ask questions? Or maybe your audience is engaging with tweets that highlight deals and offers in a certain way.
- Hashtags: What hashtags are you using, and how many? While there are some best practices for how to use hashtags on Twitter, you also want to review how your approach is working for your specific audience.
- Mentions: Do your top tweets mention influencers or specific accounts? How often do mentions play into your Tweets overall?
With all your Tweets viewable together, you can start finding themes in which parts of your content strategy are particularly successful. You want to create content in the future that is similar to types of tweets that have done well with your audience in the past. You can also use Sprout’s tagging features and Tag Report to break down your Tweets even further into thematic groups.
Step 3: Identify old tweets to delete
If you’re conducting an audit those goes back through years of content, it’s likely that your goals and messaging have changed, potentially even multiple times if you haven’t consistently audited your Twitter presence before. It’s also likely that your products or services have changed.
Go back through old tweets and delete any that don’t represent your brand well anymore, that reference outdated products or services, that promote sales or discount codes that are no longer in place or that aren’t relevant and simply aren’t going to affect your bottom line.
It’s okay to get rid of content that doesn’t fit your company and its goals and objectives anymore.
While this is likely a step you’ll need to take in a larger Twitter audit, quarterly audits may only see a few tweets that need to be scrapped every now and then.
Step 4: Update your strategy
Based on your audit, which tweets and posting strategy work best?
While you should have already noted your highest performing tweets in step two, you need to keep a record of this in your formal Twitter strategy that you share with your team.
Create or update your strategy or guidelines for what you need to post in the future, how often you should be posting and more. This helps ensure that everyone is on the right page when it comes to creating and sharing content on your brand’s Twitter account.
Learn more about your overall Twitter marketing strategy in this Sprout guide.
How to audit your Twitter followers
The next part of your Twitter audit is taking a look at your followers. Are they the best representation of your target audience? If not, you might be missing out on engagement and on the chance to build brand advocacy through an audience that is highly interested in your content.
Let’s go over the steps you need to take to audit your followers and realign them with your brand.
Step 1: Use a tool
Use a tool like Twitter Audit or one of these alternatives to analyze your followers to see how many seem low quality or fake. If you have a low audit score, you want to revisit your follow and tweeting strategy.
Make sure you research any tools before you consider connecting them to your Twitter, and stay away from using a bot that follows/unfollows accounts for you–social media platforms are cracking down on bots, and you don’t want your accounts to be penalized.
Step 2: Find your top followers
Finding your top followers, brand advocates and those that are talking about you online is a great step to understand how your followers view your brand and your Twitter profile.
And guess what? You can use Sprout Social to find all of this information.
Head over to the Reports section of your Sprout dashboard and launch the Trends report to find your brand advocates and those you mention you most often.
Click on each account to see your Twitter history with them, and what types of mentions they’re giving your brand.
Having this information will also help you to regularly find loyal followers and develop insight into what aspects of your brand they’re connecting with, as well as occasionally reward them or thank them for their brand loyalty and their business.
Step 3: Analyze your demographics
You can also use Sprout to take a look at the demographics of your followers and make sure they line up with your target audience. You can then use the information you find out about your followers to put together one or more audience profiles or personas.
Go to the Twitter Profiles report to see the age ranges and genders of your Twitter followers.
You can also use Twitter’s analytics to find audience interests and more. For example, I just found out 98% of my audience loves dogs, which is a very exciting statistic.
When putting together a follower persona based on your Twitter audit, a few of the top points to include are:
- Demographics
- Interests and purchasing behavior
- Top brand advocates
Step 4: Audit who you’re following
Finally, take a look at the accounts that you follow. Are these still in line with your target audience and your company goals and objectives?
If not, go through and unfollow accounts that don’t make sense for your business to be following.
As I mentioned earlier, be sure not to use a bot to handle your following audit. Twitter doesn’t particularly love the use of bots, so you’re better off going through this part manually.
How to audit your Twitter profile and branding
The last part of your Twitter audit focuses on your profile and its overall appearance and branding. When a user lands on your social media profiles, you want them to immediately recognize it as belonging to your company.
This can be done through branding in profile/cover photos, through the brand voice in your bio and in the visuals you share in your tweets.
Here are the steps to take when auditing your Twitter profile.
Step 1: Update your bio
When it comes to your Twitter bio, the possibilities are endless. You can do a quick overview of what your business does. You can use it to be mysterious. You can be sassy and insert some brand personality.
There are tons of different ways you can use your Twitter bio, but the key is to be creative and give it a good refresh every now and then that aligns with your brand goals.
Step 2: Brand your profile
Good rule of thumb: always upload your company logo as your profile photo on every social media platform.
But your cover photo allows you to be a bit more creative. Use this area to showcase a branded graphic or photo that represents your company and what it does.
But be sure you’re using optimal sizing for each. Your cover photo should be 1500×500 pixels while your profile photo should be any square of at least 400×400 pixels.
Another part of branding your profile is ensuring that every graphic you create and share on your Twitter profile also matches your brand guidelines and incorporates the same fonts and colors.
Step 3: Refresh your pinned tweet
On Twitter, you can pick a single tweet to pin to the top of your profile that all visitors will see first before any other tweet.
This can be a promotion for a sale or new product/service. Perhaps you had a popular tweet, and you’re pinning it to gain more traction. Or maybe you’re pinning a recent blog post to increase clicks and traffic.
The thing is, too many businesses and Twitter users pin a tweet and forget about it for weeks or months until it’s far from relevant anymore.
Each time you do another Twitter audit, take the time to also refresh your pinned tweet and save a new tweet to the top of your profile.
Conduct your own Twitter audit
Now that we’ve gone over each step in each part of a proper Twitter audit, you’re ready to dive into your own Twitter profile so see how your tweets and followers are doing.
Need some help with your reports? Sign up for a free Sprout Social trial so that you can get an all-access pass to your own awesome Twitter reports and data.