As the sixth most popular website worldwide, with 4.4 billion monthly visits, according to Sprout Social, Twitter (now X) can be a powerful digital marketing tool for driving sales and growing your business. However, success requires a strategic approach: a professional profile, high-quality content, and a robust, engaged follower list.
The best way to ensure you’re hitting these marks is with regular Twitter audits, which help to amplify your brand’s Twitter presence, grow your audience, and boost engagement rates. Let’s explore what a Twitter audit involves and how to conduct an effective one.
What is a Twitter or (X) audit?
A Twitter audit (or X audit) is an evaluation of your Twitter account, enabling you to assess its performance and ultimately optimize your marketing efforts to gain actionable insights and make informed decisions. This process includes a comprehensive sweep of your account, examining your profile, content, and followers.
Some critical questions an effective Twitter audit answers are:
- Are my profile pic and bio reflective of my brand?
- What type of content is most engaging for my users?
- What are my top-performing posts?
- Which are my most popular hashtags?
- What’s the level of follower engagement?
- Is my audience growing?
- Are my followers part of my target audience?
- What percent of my followers are fake or inactive?
Assessing your Twitter followers during an audit is particularly important. Fake and inactive followers falsely inflate your follower count, lowering your engagement rates and distorting insights gleaned from your Twitter data. Fake followers can also flood your feed with spam and scams, alienating your genuine followers and diminishing credibility and trust.
What are fake followers?
Fake accounts fall into four primary categories:
- Bot followers. Automated accounts programmed to like, retweet, or follow; some are harmless (like data collection bots), but others promote scams.
- Spammy accounts. Created to post a flurry of unsolicited posts or links to commercial websites.
- Farmed accounts. Used to bloat follower numbers for other accounts, making particular brands or marketers appear more influential than they are.
- Inactive followers. Real Twitter users who are no longer active on the platform and don’t increase engagement levels for your account.
How to identify fake followers on Twitter
To identify fake followers, take a look at the following areas:
- No profile picture, or one that looks like a fake or stock image (use reverse image search to check)
- Generic or missing personal information (e.g., no location, no bio)
- Suspicious activity, like spammy content or repetitive retweets without personal commentary
- Unbalanced follow/follower ratio, such as following thousands of accounts but having only 10 followers (likely due to lack of authentic engagement)
How to conduct a Twitter audit
- Evaluate your profile images and bio
- Analyze your tweets
- Assess your follower list
- Research your competitors
- Compare results to your goals
The actual audit doesn’t have to be difficult or daunting. Minimize missteps and maximize your Twitter presence with these five steps:
1. Evaluate your profile images and bio
Start with your Twitter profile. Your images and bio set the tone for your brand, so make sure they are polished and consistent with your broader brand identity.
Your profile picture can simply be your business logo (as it is for eco-friendly smartphone case maker Pela Case), or if you’re the face of your company, a professional image of yourself. Your cover image has more space to reflect your brand because it stretches across your profile. You want to ensure it’s eye-catching, yet instantly conveys the products or services you offer.
Also, consider a pinned post. Its visibility at the top of your profile makes its content an integral part of your account. Ensure it’s relevant to your brand, engaging, and informative—it must have purpose.
2. Analyze your tweets
Delve into how your content performs. Which posts boost engagement the most, including comments and shares? Do your top-ranking posts include videos or photos of your product, or are they offers for trending items or limited-edition deals? After you identify your best-performing posts, take a look at what times and days you published them. Any pattern you detect will spotlight your optimal times to post. Take this time to also analyze how quickly you respond to mentions and direct messages.
With a basic Twitter account, you’ll need to manually analyze these metrics. Some data will be visible only if you have a Premium or Premium+ account, which provides a dashboard that displays more in-depth metrics, from impressions—how many times people have seen your posts—to follower demographics and engagement over time.
You can also use social media analytics tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to analyze your content. These tools offer in-depth analytic reporting to help you gain valuable insight into your Twitter performance.
3. Assess your follower list
A Twitter follower audit calculates your follower growth rate and looks at follower demographics (location, interests, gender, etc.) and engagement levels to let you know how well you are hitting your target audience. It can also identify fake and inactive followers. Social media management tools can help with this analysis.
Once you’ve identified true followers versus fakes, take action. Clean up your list and get a true measure of growth and engagement by deleting the fake and inactive accounts. Increase your engagement with your key followers by following them. Strengthening connections with enthusiastic consumers could be an integral first step, especially if you’re considering brand advocates or influencers as partners.
4. Research your competitors
Armed with your own audit data, you’ll want to see how it compares to industry and competitor benchmarks. Competitor analysis is crucial in helping you gauge your Twitter success. Review your competitors’ profiles, follower lists, hashtag usage, engagement levels, and more. Tools such as Rival IQ and Followerwonk can help with this research.
Is there certain content that creates the most engagement for your competitors? What kind of followers do they have? What is their tweeting strategy? Consider what they do well and optimize your Twitter strategy accordingly.
5. Compare results to your goals
Once your audit is finished, expand your analytics lens for a broader scope. How do the results align with your marketing objectives and business goals? If you’re seeking to increase your number of social media followers, is Twitter doing its part? Are you having success on this channel that could translate to other channels, such as Facebook or Instagram? Do the tone, style, and branding on Twitter match those of your other social media profiles? The results of your Twitter audit are only beneficial if you use them effectively to adapt and optimize your social media and broader marketing strategies.
Twitter audit FAQ
What is a Twitter audit?
A Twitter audit is an evaluation of your Twitter account—your profile images and bio, your tweets and content, and your follower list. An audit helps highlight strengths and identify areas for improvement for strengthening your content, boosting maximum engagement, and enriching the quality of your follower base.
Can I see who views my Twitter profile?
No, you can’t see everyone who views your Twitter profile. You can only monitor those who engage with your posts, including shares and likes of your posts.
How do you audit Twitter followers?
You can audit your Twitter followers by examining their profiles. You can do this manually or with social media management tools. Some red flags that indicate fake followers are sharing spammy content and not having a profile picture or personal information.
