Twitter Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide

To get the most out of Twitter you need to keep your account in good shape and have a decent understanding of who is following you. The Twitter audit process that we’ve laid out below will keep you on top of your Twitter game.

If you fancy skipping to a particular section, you can do so now:

• Audit your profile
• Audit your audience
• Audit your tweets

First thoughts

Before you do any actual auditing, you need to have a strategy in mind. To get you started, our guide on social media marketing will help you decide what you want to achieve and the best way to do it.

Without goals and aims, you’ll find a Twitter audit very hard. What success looks like for a charity could be very different to what it looks like to coffee shop. So you need to know what you want to achieve to best analyze what you’ve got.

Audit your profile

First things first, let’s take a look at your profile page. Being the place with most info on your company and space available, there’s a lot you can do to get it right.

Bio

Your bio info should be pretty descriptive. If someone falls onto your page from elsewhere, they should be able to discern exactly what you do very quickly. Make sure your other details are correct and get your website in there too. Even better, use something like Bitly so you can have a shortened link and track the clicks.

Profile pictures

Next, make sure the most up-to-date logo is being used as your profile picture. It’s obviously important to have consistent branding across all of your platforms.

The cover photo is somewhere you can get more imaginative with. We had a simple design created for all of our social channels, but others will use staff photos or advertise their services in this space.

Have a think about what approach best suits your organisation. And remember it’s Twitter and it’s social media, so get a bit creative.

Pinned tweets and Moments

Twitter gives you the option to pin a tweet to the top of your page. This can be good for promoting new pieces of content, announcements, or to offer up more information about your company. Feel free to change this up as necessary based on what you want to promote most at the time.

In our case, we usually reserve it for an eye-catching tweet promoting a big piece of content. But we’ve also used it to let our customer’s know about product updates and events.

You’ll also notice a Moments tabs on a Twitter profile page. Moments allows you to collect together a bunch of tweets to create a piece of content. These can be great for telling stories, putting lots of useful information in one place, or for recapping events.

If you want some inspiration, you can check out the ones we’ve created here.

Audit your audience

With your profile looking all spick and span, it’s time to take a look at who actually follows you. This will give you insight into what kind of content you should be posting and whether your current audience is all that useful for your aims.

Weeding out the fakes

A good start is to check if you have loads of fake followers. You can throw your username into this tool and it will tell you roughly how many you have. There isn’t much to do about this unless you want to pay to find and block the fake accounts. But it will give you a truer picture of your account.

Understanding your followers

Next up is analyzing who your followers are and what they’re all about. Lucky for you our Audiences tool does just that. You can see who your most influential followers are, the kind of content that’s popular amongst them, and segment them into groups.

It can also do a whole bunch more, so go and read up on Brandwatch Audiences to see what’s possible.

Brandwatch Audiences isn’t the only option. There are some free alternatives you can use, although they have much less functionality and don’t go as deep.

Twitter’s own Analytics platform gives you information on your followers. You can get data on interests, demographics, lifestyle, and even the type of tech they use.

There’s also Moz’s Followerwonk. This can analyze all of your followers and give you details on their usage habits. Unfortunately this is only free for accounts with less than 25k followers.

Audit your tweets

After all that, it’s time to look at your tweets themselves. Don’t worry, you’re not going to have to read through every single one. There are plenty of better ways to do this. Here’s what to take a look at.

Deleting old tweets

Having been around since 2006, Twitter is is full of old and out of date tweets (not to mention the very embarrassing ones). Those tweets are searchable and they can be dug up. It can make a lot of sense to delete very old tweets and make sure the only info available is correct.

There are a few tools you can use to mass delete old tweets, while you can even set some up to automatically delete tweets when they reach a certain age. TweetDelete and TweetDeleter are two good options.

What’s working and what isn’t

Next you want to see how your tweets are performing. Our Brandwatch Analytics platform is a powerful tool for doing this. You can set up a channel to track all of your posts and see which ones got the most impressions, retweets, and other information.

With an easily sortable table, you can see your best and worst performing tweets quickly. From there you can start to get an idea of what kind of posts your audience likes and base your strategy on that. You can also analyze all the tweets written about you too.