We have reached Day 8 of the ProBlogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Our task for today is to run an audit of one of our social media accounts. We've said this every day so far, but this is something we found extremely beneficial.

We chose to audit our Twitter acccount, because we have noticed our tweets have been getting some good community engagement on Twitter

The day 8 Podcast packs a lot of information into just under 19 minutes! We will have to listen to this one again at a later date to get all the info :) The good news, is we have already tweeted our latest post. We didn't pick up all the info today, but as one big key point was

Most Bloggers are active on social media, but might not be doing so effectively

This applies to us. We are active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ Tumblr etc etc. We don't see a huge amount of traffic from social media, we hope that a lot of our 'direct traffic' is from social media, but can't be sure. Forums have been our main source of traffic.

How Did We Audit of Our Twitter Account

How Have We Been Using Twitter Until Now?
Twitter has been on the back burner, our blogging software automatically tweets our posts, and we haven't done a lot more than that. Twitter isn't a social network The Finance Guy has much experience with, so it's been neglected.

Twitter got our attention when one of our Bitcoin posts we shared on a forum was tweeted. The form was kind enough to mention @legitfinanceguy and we suddenly had some mentions retweets shares and even some new followers.

Since then we have put more effort into our Twitter presence. We've manually tweeted a few posts with pictures, and have had few more Bitcoin posts shared by forums. The result is that our Twitter presence has started growing, so it's a perfect platform to nurture.

Since our posts started getting tweeted more effectively (by a third party to whom we are very grateful), we've had a crash course in Twitter community engagement. We've seen

Our followers increase
@legitfinanceguy mentioned in tweets
Had tweets retweeted and shared
Been added to lists

We are enjoying the attention, but in all honesty don't fully understand it all. We need to

What Will We Do To Grow Our Twitter Presence

Spend More Time on Twitter
Since our posts started getting tweeted more effectively (by a third party to whom we are very grateful), we've had a crash course in Twitter community engagement. We've seen

Our followers increase
@legitfinanceguy mentioned in tweets
Had tweets retweeted and shared
Been added to lists

We are enjoying the attention, but in all honesty don't fully understand it all. We will spend time learning more about Twitter and working on growing our presence there even further.

Focus on Visual Content
This was mentioned in the Podcast, but is also something we have been aware of with Twitter. Our automated software produces text only tweets, with no hashtags. This is a flaw in our software, and we will consider turning off the twitter function and manually tweeting all our content from now on.

Today we published our link post from Day 7 of PBBB Challenge, and let our software send out the automated tweet. Two hours later, we were listening to the Day 8 Podcast and were inspired to log onto Twitter and manually tweet the same post. The difference between the two tweets is shown below:

It's no surprise that the manual tweet was more successful. Within an hour, the manual tweet had been favorited once, and we'd been added to 3 more lists. The automated tweet got no response at all

What Day 8 Has Taught Us

It's not good just throwing content on social media. We need to have a more strategic approach. What we are doing with Twitter by using pictures and hashtags is improving our community engagement. People are finding our content more easily and the pictures are getting them interested enough to engage.

Our next mission is to work Twitter even more effectively so that we are driving more traffic to our website. At the end of the day, traffic is the key to our success. Without visitors our adsense won't earn us any revenue.

That's all we have for Day 8, this is one of the many days which will go on our repeat list because we want to revisit this task in the future and continue to work on our social media presence.