Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, with more than 320 million users. Since so many people are using Twitter, there’s no denying that it’s an excellent place to engage with your audience and increase your brand’s reach.
But to do that, your Twitter account must be attractive and provide your audience with good reasons to engage with it.
It can be a bit tricky to know whether or not your account is actually successful at doing this.
Enter Twitter audits.
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With regular and thorough tweet audit, you can determine just how effective your Twitter marketing strategies are and where you should pick up the slack.
Let’s look at why Twitter audits are necessary and how you can ensure your audits are achieving these goals.
Why Conduct a Twitter Audit
Twitter audits have one primary purpose and that is to diagnose your account. They help you examine your account’s performance by inspecting your analytics, post times, audience, content, consistency, and overall sentiment.
You should audit your account regularly to ensure it’s doing well, so you’ll be able to pick up on any problems before they become too serious.
Here are the most common questions that a Twitter audit must answer:
- Who is your audience?
- Are you posting consistently enough?
- What type of content are you sharing?
- What type of content does your audience prefer?
- When are your followers most active?
- What can you do to improve your presence?
- What does your ROI (Return on Investment) look like?
The two most important factors that your audits should cover are your metrics and general sentiment.
If you don’t keep an eye on your account and its performance, it will become increasingly difficult to determine whether it’s achieving marketing goals or not.
Steps to Conduct a Twitter Audit
The following steps are meant to guide your posts on your journey to achieving a perfect Twitter audit. Use the advice shared here to inspire you but feel free to add any steps you think are important to your account.
You will be using data from Twitter Analytics (free to use) for your auditing. This free twitter audit can help you in the long run once you learn to handle all its aspects.
1. Start With Your Goals
Before you can actually start with a Twitter audit, you need to define what it is that you’re hoping to achieve with your account.
Twitter is fantastic for brand awareness and customer service, but that’s not all it can do for brands.
What do you want as a result of your Twitter activity?
Speaking of goals – it’s important that you know what Twitter is doing for your social media marketing strategies. It’s a good idea to step back and look at your goals; what do you want for your business, and how does social media – and Twitter – help with those goals?
If it helps, make a list of the goals you have for your Twitter account. Your list can be as long or as short as you want it to be, as long as it’s realistic for your business and your marketing team.
2. Audit Your Tweets
Once you know your goals, you can move onto the auditing of your Twitter account, which sounds more intense than it really is.
The first step is to analyze all your existing tweets to see how they have performed.
For this, head over to your dashboard and click on the ‘Tweets’ Tab.
From there, you can choose a duration and you will see your tweets for that time. You will then be able to see engagement statistics as well as your top and promoted tweets. You can download the metrics in an excel sheet if you want to view them later by using Twitter Analytics’ ‘export data’ feature.
Source: Socialinsider
If you want, you can also use a third-party analytics Twitter audit tool for additional data.
When you look at this information, try to see patterns and trends. Compare the best and worst-performing tweets and identify the differences.
Some things to look for are tweets that get good engagement and lead to more clicks. Check the comments and replies you get from your followers to gauge how they feel about your content.
Retweets can also indicate how your audience feels about the tweets you’re crafting.
While you’re examining your tweets, delete the tweets that aren’t adding value to your account. If there is content that doesn’t reflect your brand image anymore or doesn’t support your brand voice, there’s no point in holding on to it.
If any tweets contradict your brand or might harm your reputation, get rid of them as well. It’s highly recommended that you have a social media policy in place that will avoid any transgressions or mistakes.
Using a tool to identify fake followers and bots is also highly recommended. Twitter Audit could be just the tool you need for this. Identify and shake off any fakes that do nothing good for your account.
Social media platforms are becoming more strict with bots and fake followers, so it’s a good idea to steer clear of them completely. If you don’t, your account might come under scrutiny, and it may even be suspended.
Source: Twitter Audit
3. Audit Your Audience
The second part of your Twitter audit is to analyze your audience. You need to determine your following demographic. That way, you can better understand your audience and customize your content for better results.
Twitter Analytics has an audience analytics feature that should suffice for this step. You can see the demographic of your audience as well as their top interests.
You can use the data to get ideas for future content that will appeal more to your audience for more engagement.
The information will help ensure you keep your audience interested, and you might even be inspired and come up with new ideas.
Additionally, you can also get insight into buying styles and customer purchase behavior, which can be very useful for businesses. With that kind of info, you can target users with more direct content that can lead to more conversion and better lead generation.
A good audit of your audience will also help you identify your top followers. They could make great brand advocates or provide you with user-generated content that can come in handy in the future.
4. Audit Your Profile
Finally, you need to audit your Twitter profile. You don’t have to rely on any tools for this, and it should be fairly easy to take care of.
All you really have to do is make sure that your profile is updated and always looks good. Your bio must reflect your brand voice and personality, and if this has changed over the years, it might be time to do some updating.
You must ensure your contact details are accurate as well.
Source: Hootsuite
Don’t change your profile too much or too often because this can lead to confusion. Just do so when and if necessary.
A good idea would be to keep your Pinned Tweet fresh. They serve as nice ways to do promotion but make sure they’re not too old, or the content isn’t irrelevant now.
Having a polished and refined Twitter profile is good practice, especially if you want to make a nice impression on your audience. Professional businesses won’t have sloppy or half-finished profiles, after all.
Every kind of business can benefit from social media marketing and good habits on their chosen platforms. Even Software as a Service (SaaS) companies can grow when they’ve got a good strategy in place and do regular audits to ensure maximum success.
No matter what industry you’re in, there’s no reason not to use Twitter to your advantage.
Best Practices for Your Twitter Audit
In addition to doing regular Twitter audits, you need to follow the best practices to ensure the best results. Here are a few ideas to get you off on the right foot:
1. Calculate Your ROI
You need to ensure that everything you’re putting into your Twitter account is worth the time, effort, and sometimes money.
Tracking KPIs and metrics, in general, is important when it comes to marketing. How else will you know if your ideas work or not?
Source: Union Metrics
If you’re using Twitter for marketing, it’s likely that your account is meant to drive traffic, so you have to have ways of determining if that’s actually happening.
Are your followers engaging with your content? Do they find your website? Are visitors converting into customers?
Your metrics will depend on your goals and should be monitored closely if you want successful strategies. When you know which strategies work, you can build on them and keep improving.
Your ROI can be calculated in different ways, depending on your KPIs and metrics. For example, if you want to create sales leads, it would be a good idea to use a tool like Google Analytics for visitor-to-lead rate data.
Speaking of visitor-to-lead rates…
2. Analyze Your Visitor-to-Lead Rate
If you want a clear way of ensuring that your social media marketing efforts are actually paying off, this is an important metric.
Your visitor-to-lead rate is basically the number of visitors coming from Twitter that are becoming potential customers.
To set up goals for this, determine how many leads you want to generate every month. Divide that amount by the number of business days in that month, and you’ll have the daily goal that must be met.
Twitter may seem like nothing more than a place to share news and memes, but it can be a powerful lead generation tool.
You just have to use it right and monitor your results.
3. Nail Your Social Strategy
Admittedly, this step is not just one simple thing you can do and pat yourself on the back. It takes research, dedication, and patience.
There are many different strategies you can use, such as dedicating an entire campaign to inviting people to follow your account. You can entice them with benefits and keep them hooked with great content.
You can even incorporate email marketing strategies into your Twitter marketing for great results.
Or you can share unique content that will make your account stand out, or host promotions, sales, or competitions.
There really are many strategies you can use, but the important thing is to get it right. To truly nail a social strategy, you need to plan it well.
Also, it might be tempting to combine a bunch of different ideas into one strategy, but it’s better to have one or two ideas that you build around. When you’ve got too much going on, you’re bound to get confused, and so is your audience.
You can fail at social media marketing by not adhering to proper etiquette. Social media etiquette is essential if you want to be taken seriously and if you want to build a good reputation.
Your reputation can make or break your brand, so make sure following these social rules is part of your strategy.
There are tons of marketing tech (software) you can use that will improve your strategies, so don’t hesitate to make the most of as many as you’re comfortable with.
4. Regularly Audit
A Twitter audit isn’t something that you can do once and then forget about. The key is to repeat regularly.
Social media platforms are constantly changing, your audience’s sentiment might be just as fickle, and marketing strategies can become outdated really fast.
By doing regular maintenance on your Twitter account, you can ensure that your content is always attractive, your account is polished, and your audience is entertained.
That’s how you’ll achieve your goals and meet your KPIs.
Whip Your Twitter Account into Shape
We’ve covered the foundations of Twitter Audits and why you need to execute them regularly. The best practices have also been discussed, so you now have no excuse not to shake your Twitter account into fantastic shape.
Use the advice shared here to become a Twitter audit pro, and go make the most of this popular social media platform!
