How to Do an X (Twitter) Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide

What is an X audit?

An X audit refers to the process of reviewing and evaluating various aspects of your X account to ensure you’re following best practices. An audit like this gives you insight into your X performance and pinpoints areas for improvement. 

Specifically, it's a comprehensive look at your presence on X, including your profile information and visuals, how your posts perform, what others are posting about you, and what your following looks like. After the assessment, you will have a clear understanding of what is working and what is not.

Why should you do an X audit?

Analyzing your social media efforts is important to determine if your existing social media strategy is working for your brand. It will help you improve your social media strategy, drive better results, and increase your social ROI.

First things first

Before you start, you might want to consider reviewing your social media strategy. Specifically, your goals and objectives. Without goals and objectives, you'll find an audit very difficult. What success looks like for a charity might be very different from what it looks like for a coffee shop. So, you need to know what you want to achieve to best analyze what you've got.

Audit your profile

Let’s take a look at your profile page. This is the place on X that hosts information about your company, so it's important to get it right and check it regularly to make sure the information and visuals are up to date.

Bio

Your bio information should be very descriptive. Visitors should be able to quickly see exactly who you are and what you do. Make sure your other information is accurate, and consider including a relevant link (for example, to your website). Even better, you can use a short link generator tool to shorten the link and track the clicks.

If you have multiple accounts, such as for customer support, you can link the handle in your bio description, so people can easily see what other accounts you have. 

For example, Walmart uses the bio description to draw attention to their customer support account: 

Profile and cover picture

Usually, you’d want to use your logo as your profile picture. It's obviously important to have consistent branding across all of your platforms.

The cover photo is where you can get more creative. Adding a human touch to your page with staff photos or product promotions can be a great opportunity.

Netflix, for example, uses the cover photo to promote new content.

Think about what approach works best for your organization. You can get creative to catch the eye of visitors to your profile page. After all, it's social media, and you can experiment with different approaches. Check out our social media image size guide to make sure you use the right dimensions.

Pinned posts

On X, you can pin important posts to the top of your page, so it’s the first thing people see when they visit. This can be great for promoting new content, spotlighting product announcements, or providing more information about your business. Do change this as needed, depending on what you want to highlight at a given time. 

Let's take Nike, for example, which used the pinned post to celebrate the Spanish football player Aitana Bonmati.

Or Samsung promoting a new Google search feature on their Samsung Galaxy S24.

Audit your audience

Now that your profile looks great, it's time to take a look at who's following you. This will give you insight into what kind of content you should be posting and whether your current audience is as useful as you want them to be.

Weeding out fake followers​​

A good place to start is to check if you have a lot of fake followers. Missing profile information, such as no profile picture or bio, can be an indicator that it's a fake account. You can check for fake followers with third-party tools like FollowerAudit to get an idea of how many you have. 

Getting rid of fake followers can be a challenge. A large number of fake followers can hurt your engagement metrics and, worst case, your reputation. 

Once you have identified your fake followers, you can manually block and remove them from your follower list or use a third-party tool to remove them in bulk and save time. You can also report accounts with suspicious activity to X.

Building a real follower base may be lower in terms of numbers, but it’s much higher in terms of quality, and this will also be reflected in your engagement numbers. Taking a look at your followers from time to time to weed out the fake ones can help you maintain an audience that is interested and engaged.

Understanding your followers

The next step is to analyze who your followers are and what they are interested in. There are several methods and tools to help you do this.

For an easy overview, X's analytics platform is a good starting point. Here, you can see some basic statistics about your followers, such as follower growth and engagement rate.

For a deeper understanding of your followers, we recommend using a social media analytics tool like Brandwatch Measure. With Measure, you can get a variety of follower metrics, such as follower growth over time, time of day when your followers are online, or demographic breakdowns like age and gender. With these insights, you can tailor and optimize your social media strategy on X.

Audit your posts

Now it's time to look at what you’re posting. Don't worry, you don't have to read every single post you’ve shared since the 2000s. There are many better ways to do that. Here's how.

Deleting old posts

Since X has been around since 2006, there are probably many old and outdated posts (not to mention very embarrassing ones) on the platform. These posts are searchable and can be dug up. It might make sense to delete old posts and make sure the only information available is correct.

There are a few tools you can use to bulk delete old posts, and you can even set some rules to automatically delete posts when they reach a certain age. This can be very helpful to save you time, and you don’t have to go back and read your old posts manually.

What’s working and what isn’t?

Next, you’ll want to see how your posts are performing.

With Brandwatch Measure, you can track your social media performance in real time and see which posts are getting the most engagement. You can create your own dashboard or use a template to easily compare your top-performing posts.

You can see what kind of content your audience likes best and what kind of content isn't driving engagement. Based on these insights, you can improve your content strategy and get better results.

You can get insights about your social media performance with the analytics platform on X as well. You can look at post performance, but you can't look at it over a long period of time all at once. If you don’t have a social media tool handy, you can export the data and build a spreadsheet yourself to include as much time as you want.

Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics can also be great for X auditing. It picks up traffic from X on its own, but you can distinguish between organic and owned traffic by using Google's campaign URL tags. This can help you see the traffic you are getting from your posts.

You can use Google's own Campaign URL builder to create the URLs you need. It's super simple but pretty powerful. Just make sure you consistently use the same setup for URLs so you can effectively compare them over time.

Here's some additional information on how to track campaign data by setting up custom URLs.