Firstly, let’s define what an Audit is:

“A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic, independent, and periodic examination of a company’s or a business unit’s marketing. It is designed to evaluate marketing assets and activities in the context of market conditions, and use the resulting analysis to aid the firm in planning” (Clark, 2017)

A Twitter audit is a diagnosis of your Twitter account’s performance. During a Twitter audit, you want to look at your Tweets, followers and the overall branding of your account.

The goal is to find any weaknesses or holes in your account, and potential opportunities for improvement. For social media marketers, a lot of focus gets put on growing your account, getting more followers on Twitter and increasing traffic. But unless you’re taking a second to audit everything you’re doing, it’s difficult to gauge whether you’re making the right decisions.

Here’s how to perform a complete Twitter Audit.

The process is broken down into 2 easy steps and proven methods to use:

1. Auditing your Tweets using Dave Chaffey
2. Auditing your followers using PR Smith’s SOSTAC®

#1 Auditing your Tweets

Let’s start by auditing your tweets with the use of one of Dave Chaffey’s channels: Social media Marketing Channel for Twitter

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An alternative method for Auditing you tweets: The 10 C’s of Online Marketing.

The 10 C’s of modern marketing was designed specifically for digital marketing by Chartered Institute of Marketing examiner Richard Gay, (2007).

Here are a few insights explained, but you can find a detailed guide here.

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Now you know the 10 C’s. Put them in to practice by applying each section to Audit your tweets and draw on conclusions from each section.

#2 Auditing your followers using PR Smith’s SOSTAC®

Knowing who’s following you will help you produce content that’s more tailored toward your audience. Sometimes when your Tweets aren’t getting as much engagement as you’d like, it’s because there’s a disconnect between what you’re sharing and what your audience wants to see. The first step in fixing that problem is analyzing who’s following you.

SOSTAC® is a planning model, originally developed in the 1990s to help with marketing planning by PR Smith. You should start by creating a plan for Twitter social media that follows the SOSTAC® structure:

• Situation: An assessment of the current situation (both internally e.g. team capacity to manage SM channels, and externally such as competition, target audience etc.)
• Objectives: A list of SMART objectives to be achieved
• Strategy: A plan of how to get there based on insights about the audiences you are targeting and the content formats and types to engage your audience and hit your targets
• Tactics: Which networks to use, how often to share content, who will be responsible, what content to share etc.)
• Actions: Deliverables (what’s in and out of scope)
• Control: A set of benchmarks and KPIs to help analyse results, as well to reporting against these

! Before looking at how you apply SOSTAC® at each step to create a marketing plan, my first tip is to use it to review your planning process and how you manage your marketing.

Ask yourself critically about the activities you personally and your organisation are good at. Maybe you spend too much or too little time reviewing the situation. Perhaps you’re not so good at setting SMART objectives, or developing strategies to support them or the control stage of assessing how effective your strategies and tactics are and adjusting them?

Below is a guide of the SOSTAC® planning system. Applying these to your Twitter followers can help you gain a view of the channel to identify where to enhance.

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Source: (Smart Insights, 2017)

Here is a video on how to use the SOSTAC® planning system.

To further understand your followers using platforms such as followerwonk will allow you to explore and grow your social graph. Dig deeper into Twitter analytics: Who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet?

Here is a snippet of where an organization’s (Trust-hub Ltd) followers are located:

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Source: (Moz.com, 2017)

Using this tool, I can understand the reach of followers are located all over the world. This audit has allowed me to conclude the tweets need to be repeated for different time zones so other followers do not miss them.

& that’s a wrap, start your twitter audit now and change your social channel today!

References:

Clark, B. (2017). Marketing Audit.

Cleverism. (2017). How to Prepare a Marketing Audit to Shape Your Marketing Strategy. [online] Available at: https://www.cleverism.com/marketing-audit-that-shapes-marketing-strategy/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Moz.com. (2017). Followerwonk: Tools for Twitter Analytics, Bio Search and More. [online] Available at: https://moz.com/followerwonk/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

NOW Marketing Group | Marketing Agency in Northwestern Ohio. (2017). Social Media Audit for Twitter | NOW Marketing Group | Marketing Agency in Northwestern Ohio. [online] Available at: https://nowmarketinggroup.com/social-media-audit-twitter/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

 Sprout Social. (2017). The 20 Minute Twitter Audit. [online] Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-audit/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Smart Insights. (2017). The 10 C’s Digital Marketing Model | Smart Insights. [online] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/marketing-planning/marketing-models/10-cs-marketing-modern-economy/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Smart Insights. (2017). 10 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes | Smart Insights. [online] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/advice/10-common-social-media-marketing-mistakes/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Smart Insights. (2017). Managing social media plan example template | Smart Insights. [online] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/social-media-plan-example-template/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Smart Insights. (2017). SOSTAC marketing planning model guide. [online] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/sostac-model/ [Accessed 2 Dec. 2017].