How to Conduct a Twitter Audit in 3 Easy Steps?

If the Devumi expose followed by Twitter’s fake follower purge has taught us anything is that a high follower count doesn’t necessarily mean high engagement. Brands and marketers often face situations where they have a large follower base but fewer interactions. This is why performing a Twitter audit is important.

Twitter is one of the most influential social media marketing platforms in 2021. While its userbase is nowhere close to giants like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is widely sought-after as a fast and reliable source of news and updates. Almost every major brand, marketer, influencer, celebrity, artist, etc, use Twitter to increase their social media authority.

Although, Twitter is a highly competitive social media platform, and it’s definitely not easy to reach new users. While planning effective social media strategies is important, so is monitoring and measuring the impact of those implemented strategies. Your follower count and interactions are a good indicator, but they don’t help you understand the whole picture. On the other hand, performing a Twitter audit can help you better evaluate your social media success.

A Twitter audit is like a quick but comprehensive overview of your Twitter profile’s performance metrics. It helps you better analyze the various facets of your brand’s Twitter profile. This further helps in accessing how your Twitter profile is performing. A Twitter audit also provides numerous insights that can help you plan effective marketing strategies.

While this may not be beneficial for personal accounts, businesses using Twitter to promote themselves should definitely audit their Twitter accounts.

Before performing a Twitter audit, it’s best to clearly define your goals. Doing so can help you perform a more focused Twitter audit. Defining your goals (lead generation, analyzing public sentiment, increasing brand awareness, enhance engagement, etc) can help you derive actionable insights from associated performance metrics.

When you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you can perform Twitter audits at regular time intervals to evaluate your performance and social media authority.

Now, as for conducting a Twitter audit, you can either do it manually or use a Twitter audit tool to do it for you. You can also leverage the in-built tools or features of Twitter to perform a Twitter audit. Some of those tools are,

• Native Twitter Analytics
• Twitter Advanced Search
• Download your Twitter Archives

To perform a Twitter audit, you need to analyze and evaluate all facets of your Twitter profile. We can classify the facets into three broad categories,

• Twitter profile
• Published tweets
• Twitter audience

Analyzing all three categories can help you better evaluate your brand’s position in the industry along with its popularity among the target audience.

Now that you know what a Twitter audit is, let’s discuss all the elements and aspects of your Twitter profile that should audit. Let’s dive in,

1. Twitter Audit of Account

This part of you auditing your Twitter profile does not require a specialized Twitter audit tool and can be done manually.

Your Twitter profile is the first thing a user sees when they search your brand name on Twitter. An incomplete or poorly optimized Twitter profile will not leave a long-lasting impression. Also, by keeping your profile incomplete, you are losing opportunities to promote your products and service. The various elements of a Twitter profile can be used to showcase your products or services. New businesses can also use the various elements to help users easily understand what they do and what kind of services they offer.

Various elements of a Twitter profile

• Twitter handle/Username: Brands and businesses use Twitter handles that can be easily recognized. A complex and unrelatable username will only make it difficult for users to recognize your brand.
• Profile picture: Your profile picture is one of the most important elements that can make your brand’s Twitter profile more recognizable.
• Bio: Your Twitter bio is another prominent element that you can leverage to explain what your brand does. You can also add a touch of humor to make it more engaging. Most brands and businesses stick to finding their brand voice and implementing it in their Twitter bio. You can also include your website link in the bio, it can increase website traffic.
• Header image: The header image is an important element that you can use to showcase your brand’s products or services.
• Other details: Remember to fill out all the other personal and contact information.

These elements don’t have to be updated frequently, so, you can take your time optimizing your Twitter profile. Another element of your Twitter profile that you can use for marketing purposes is the pinned tweets feature. You can pin your most performing tweets or latest updates on the top of your Twitter feed. This will help you increase engagement and impression on your tweets which further helps in increasing brand awareness.

2. Twitter Audit of Tweets 

The next step in performing a Twitter audit is analyzing your tweets. There are various ways you can do this,

Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter advanced search is one of the most useful but unappreciated features of Twitter. This search feature can provide you access to tweets of any public Twitter account. There are various filtering options you can use to extract specific tweets.

The tweet filtering options include,

• Words
• Accounts
• Replies
• Links
• Engagement
• Dates

You can use this to identify the most popular as well as the least engaging tweets of your Twitter profile. To know more about Twitter advanced search, click here.

Twitter analytics dashboard

The native Twitter analytics dashboard is one of the most useful features. It provides a detailed 28-day summary of your performance metrics. The tools also provide various analytical insights that can help you boost your social media engagement and visibility. The various metrics are classified into various categories. Some of the most important categories are,

1. Home: This category includes various statistics that provide an in-depth overview of your Twitter profile’s monthly performance. It also lists the most-performing tweets and influencers engage with your brand or business’s Twitter profile.

2. Tweets: This section provides the engagement metrics for all the tweets published in the said month. The statistics include likes, retweets, replies, impressions, reach, engagement rate, most shared URLs, and more. 

3. Video: Similar to the tweets category, the video category provides performance metrics related to the videos posted on your brand’s Twitter profile. The statistics include total views, completion rate, total minutes viewed, retention rate, etc.

Download your archive to perform Twitter audit

Twitter has been recording your Twitter activities and posts since the creation of your account. You can use this to analyze your Twitter activity and audit your Twitter profile. To download your Twitter archive just follow these simple steps,

Desktop version

• Log in to your Twitter account
• Click on More and then on Settings and Privacy
• In the Your Account section click on Download an archive of your data
• Enter your password and click on Request archive

Your report will soon start generating and you will receive your Twitter archive through the email associated with your Twitter account.

Use an analytics tool to conduct a Twitter audit

While the above-mentioned ways to audit tweets are effective, major brands and marketers often require third-party Twitter audit tools that can analyze their competitor’s tweets as well. Doing so helps brands and marketers spy on their competition and leverage their effective social media strategies.

Best Twitter audit tools for tweets,

Let’s look at some of the most effective tools that can help you audit tweets,

TrackMyHashtag

TrackMyHashtag is an AI-enabled hashtag and event tracking Twitter analytics tool. It can help you track, monitor, and analyze the performance metrics of tweets related to any hashtag, keyword, or @mention in real-time. It is also designed to help users access and analyze the performance metrics of historical tweets as well.

Key features of TrackMyHashtag,

• Track tweets in real-time
• Extract historical Twitter data
• Detailed tweet performance metric
• Intuitive analytical dashboard
• Extract Twitter data in raw Excel/CSV files

You can leverage this tool to extract and analyze the performance metrics of tweets related to any specific time duration. The basic monthly

FollowersAnalysis

FollowersAnalysis is another great analytics tool that can help you analyze the tweets posted by any Twitter account. Although, you can only analyze the most recent 3200 tweets posted by any public Twitter account. Apart from auditing your tweets, FollowersAnalysis can also analyze the Twitter followers of public accounts.

Key features of FollowersAnalysis,

• Analyze most recent 3200 tweets
• Comprehensive tweet analysis report and data
• Analyze Twitter followers
• Comprehensive follower analysis report and data

FollowersAnalysis does follow a subscription-based pricing model. The tweet analysis reports cost $29 per report. Whereas the FollowersAnalysis report starts from $39 per report and the price may increase depending on the size of the targeted accounts Twitter follower base.

Twitonomy

Twitonomy is a widely popular free Twitter analytics tool that can help you analyze the performance metrics of any public Twitter account. It can help you access detailed analysis and statistical insights for any public Twitter account.

Key features of Twitonomy,

• Search Analytics
• Tweet Monitoring
• Real-time Tracking
• Comprehensive Insights

It is a great tool for new businesses or brands that have yet to amass a significant follower base. The analytical insights can help analyze the impact of implemented strategies. You can track the engagement metrics for your tweets and improvise strategies in real-time if the performance is not as expected.

3. Twitter Audit of Followers 

Now, the last and perhaps the most important thing left to do is audit your Twitter followers. This can help you identify the type of audience you are engaging with. A Twitter audit also helps you evaluate the authenticity and credibility of your social media follower base.

If you have just started promoting your brand on Twitter and have a couple thousand followers, you can manually audit Twitter followers.  As for established brands, I suggest using an effective Twitter audit tool to audit followers. Major brands and businesses have thousands if not millions of Twitter followers. Auditing such a large audience size can be tedious and time-consuming. Also, any minor mistakes while analyzing the followers can drastically alter the statistical output and insights. You surely don’t want that happening.

FollowerAudit is an amazing paid Twitter audit tool that can help you audit the Twitter followers of any public Twitter account. The tool can also track the Twitter follower growth of any public Twitter account and provide instant notifications on gaining or losing each follower. FollowerAudit can also help you spot fake Twitter followers from any public user’s account.

Auditing your Twitter profile can help you identify fake and inactive Twitter accounts that inflate follower counts but do not provide engagement. Unlike some tools, FollowerAudit audits your entire Twitter follower base rather than just a sample of the follower base. You can get access to precise analytical insights and statistics that can help you better evaluate your audience.

FollowerAudit also allows you to analyze the Twitter follower base of any public Twitter user. The analytical insights provide comprehensive about your target audience and help plan effective social media strategies to increase your brand’s social media presence.

The basic monthly premium plan starts at $29.99, per month.

FollowerAudit key features,

• Spot Fake Twitter Followers

FollowerAudit is a Twitter analytics tool that is developed to identify fake Twitter followers. It analyzes various aspects of a Twitter account and evaluates its authenticity. These aspects include,

• Followers with no profile picture
• Followers with less tweets
• Followers with less followers
• Followers without bios
• Followers without location information
• Followers with an uneven follower-following ratio
• Followers without URL
• Followers with spammy usernames
• Inactive followers for a specific time

Some important fake follower audit metrics:

• Track Twitter Followers Growth

FollowerAudit Twitter follower trackers can also track follower growth of any public Twitter account. The tool provides instant updates and notifications on gaining or losing each follower. You can even extract lists of new and lost followers. You can further analyze their Twitter accounts to identify accounts that are worth retaining.

Some important Twitter follower tracker metrics:

• Analyze Twitter Followers

FollowerAudit can analyze the Twitter followers of any public Twitter account as well regardless of the size of your follower base. You can extract your entire Twitter following and followers in separate Excel/CSV files. The analytical PDF reports provide various analytical insights about your followers and following.

The Twitter followers analysis feature also analyzes the most recent 3200 tweets posted by the targeted Twitter account. You can gain insights into the content strategy of any public Twitter account.

Some important Twitter followers analysis metrics:

4. Twitter Audit of Accounts you Follow

If you aren’t the primary administrator of your organization or brand’s Twitter account, you most probably don’t have any idea about the accounts it follows. But just like your followers, you must also audit these accounts as follows. There is always a possibility that your account may have followed some fake accounts. Analyze all the accounts and unfollow those that do not align with your interests.

FollowerAudit is an amazing Twitter analysis tool that can help you analyze the authenticity and credibility of any public Twitter account. You can easily identify and block fake Twitter followers from your Twitter profile. You can also use it to analyze and find the right influencer to promote your brand.

You can also track your Twitter follower growth in real-time which can help you identify the impact of your implemented strategies and measure their effectiveness. Start tracking your Twitter follower growth today, to expand your brand’s social media horizons.

See you next time.