Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking platforms. With over 400 million active users, it’s a powerful tool for businesses and individuals. But with great power comes great responsibility, and if you’re not using Twitter analytics, you’re not using Twitter to its full potential.
Users can access Twitter Analytics to track key metrics such as impressions, engagement rate, and follower count growth. You also have the Analytics dashboard, where you can generate reports to help track your account’s performance.
Twitter analytics can seem daunting, but they don’t have to be. This guide will show you how to get the most out of Twitter analytics and use them to improve your Twitter strategy.
Advantages Of Tracking Twitter Analytics
Numbers help solidify a social media campaign strategy. Twitter Analytics is a source of valuable data that can set up your campaign for success. Here are the main advantages of tracking Twitter Analytics:
Get To Know Your Audience
Twitter Analytics provides you with information about your audience that can help you better tailor your content. This includes demographics such as gender, age, location, buying styles, and household income.
Measure Growth
Twitter Analytics is a tool that allows users to track the performance of their account over time and to see insights such as popular trends, top tweets, followers, mentions, and more. This data helps see what types of content successfully gain followers or drive them away.
Optimize Posting Times
If you want to grow on Twitter, you need t know when to post. You can check Twitter Analytics and use third-party tools like Publer to help schedule your posts around optimal times. As your audience grows, so does your wiggle room to see when your followers are most active. You can also try to post at different times of the day to see when users are most engaged.
Who Should Use Twitter Analytics?
Anyone who wishes to refine their content strategy should use Twitter Analytics. Twitter Analytics provides data to help increase engagement rate and account performance, and these insights are valuable to marketing practitioners, managers, and agencies.
Individuals
Twitter Analytics is a tool that helps users understand their audience and improve their brand. Campaign reports show users how their Twitter campaign performs and how each tweet impacts their overall account performance. Twitter Analytics allows individuals to track essential metrics and customize their reporting to get the most out of their data, analyze campaign results, and monetize content.
Social Media Managers
Twitter Analytics can help managers compare their paid and organic efforts, assess their team’s performance, and gauge the social return on Investment (ROI) based on reports that show their team members’ reply stats and average response times. The data can also help managers evaluate strategies for improvement and recognize the best performers on their team.
Agencies
Agencies can use Twitter Analytics to provide reports on user clicks, impressions, and engagement that are easy to interpret, even for non-marketing professionals. They can also build reports specific to their clients needs and personalize them with their branding and templates, making them ideal for delivering recurring reports.
How To Use Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics provides a dashboard where you can monitor the overall performance of your account. You can get access from your most loyal followers and top content to trends and even an ideal posting schedule.
To access Twitter analytics from your desktop, go to analytics.twitter.com on your browser or click More from your profile sidebar and go to Analytics. Click Get Started if you haven’t set up your dashboard. Your account must be at least 14-days old to access the dashboard.
You can only see per-tweet analytics when using your mobile. Search for the tweet you want to get data from and tap on the bottom right corner of the tweet.
Now that you know how to access your Analytics, find out how you can use them for actionable insights to improve your brand’s Twitter presence:
1. Determine Your Top-Performing Content
Look at your previous tweets and see which performed best. This data can help position your next content strategy to follow the same tone and messaging.
To find your Top posts, categorize them based on the metrics you want to measure, like impressions, clicks, and engagement. When you’re done organizing your content, check the patterns on the Top Tweets for future use.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Did the Tweet include a hashtag, mention, or question?
- Is there a particular schedule that works best for your audience in terms of engagement?
Bonus Tip: Download your Top Tweets and develop a word cloud to summarize common themes or ideas extracted from the results.
2. Analyze Your Twitter Behavior
Identify trends in your account performance by analyzing your month-on-month Twitter behavior. Monitor key metrics like:
- Tweet volume
- Visits to your Twitter profile
- The number of Tweets mentioning you
- The number of followers you have
3. Do Competitor Analysis
Twitter analytics can help you compare other profiles by tracking significant metrics. It does not provide actual competitor reports, but you can use a third-party analytics tool like Sprout to pull up those reports.
Once you have the data you need, determine factors like:
- Their account growth in the past months
- Their most recent posts
- Duration or schedule of their posting
- Their interaction with followers
4. Understand Your Twitter Followers
Twitter Analytics can help you better understand your followers so you can post engaging content that they will enjoy. Look at the audience demographics, interests, lifestyle, and more to get an idea of what your followers might like to see.
5. Find Possible Collaborations With Twitter Influencers
Twitter Analytics allows you to search your Top Followers for collaborations to add to your influencer mix. You can filter names, set criteria to shortlist influencers, and benchmark your marketing strategy.
6. Monitor Popular Hashtags, Trends, and Top Keywords
Twitter Analytics can help you identify relevant hashtags and topics for your brand, as well as track keywords and monitor their performance over time. You can also analyze the search volume for a given keyword and determine how well a campaign performs based on the top accounts that previously used that keyword.
7. Visualize Twitter Campaigns
Twitter Analytics can guide the direction of your paid campaigns better. You will know your campaign is a success if it gets traction and good numbers using metrics like:
- Impressions
- Engagement rate
- Clicks
- Cost-per-results
6 Important Twitter Analytics to Track
Twitter Analytics is a great way to improve your campaign strategies. It can help you determine best practices and pinpoint metrics to guide the campaign’s direction.
Monthly Performance Overview
Your monthly performance overview on the homepage of your Twitter Analytics dashboard shows a 28-day summary of your Twitter account. This report can help you monitor the monthly growth performance of your account and see accurate results in real time. You can also access tweet highlights from the report, such as:
- Top tweets (including media tweets) and mentions which garnered the highest number of impressions
- Top accounts with the highest follower count that followed you in that particular month
- Top card tweet with the highest number of impressions (if applicable)
Use these key statistics to create reshared or retweeted posts from your top tweets and interact with your top followers to build relationships.
Conversion Data
For paid campaigns, your conversion data can help monitor and manage your ad spend efficiently. To find this data, go to the Analytics Dashboard, click More, and click Conversion Tracking. You can monitor user behavior, such as app installations and sign-ups, and convert them into leads.
Bonus Tip: Create and install a website tag to track user clicks and activities.
Trend Insights
By monitoring your Twitter activity and trends, you can ensure that your content strategy is practical and relevant. Analytics provide vital metrics that can help you gauge the success of your content strategy, including total followers, follower growth, tweets, Twitter impressions, engagement rates, retweets, and likes.
You can also use the native Twitter Analytics dashboard to find the trend data for five tweet engagement metrics on the right side of the “tweets” page.
Engagement Rate
The engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions. To find the engagement rate, go to the tweet activity dashboard and look in the far-right column. The engagement rate will be listed after Twitter Impressions and Engagement.
You can export data from the Twitter dashboard and download it into Excel or Google Sheets. Twitter can show data for up to 3,200 tweets, with a breakdown of all Twitter impressions and other engagement metrics.
Bonus Tip: You can monitor how your followers interact with your tweets by calculating the average engagement rate by engagement type. To do this, divide the number of likes by the total number of impressions to get your like rate.
Type of Engagement
To find out which type of engagement yielded high results from your tweets, go to your Twitter Analytics dashboard, click on Tweets, and go to View tweet activity. From there, you can select any tweet from the list. You can also get this information outside your dashboard by clicking the bar chart icon from the tweet you are interested in.
Here are the different engagement types and what they could mean:
- Retweets: users found value in your content
- Likes: users appreciate your tweet
- Link clicks: users found your content relevant
- Detail expands: users are curious to find out more about the story of your tweet
- Profile clicks: users are interested to know your brand more
- Media engagements: users can’t get enough of your content
There are two crucial metrics to track engagement: tweet impressions by the time of day and engagement rate by time of day.
Tweet impressions show how many people have seen your tweets and track the ideal daily posting time to expand your reach. Here’s how you can find your Tweet impressions:
- Export your Twitter report and change the format of the Time column.
- Use this formula to view the numbers as minutes/hours: =ArrayFormula(mid(D2:D,1,16)).
- Create a new column and paste the formula into the top row to fill the entire column.
- Copy the values and paste them into a new column to format the numbers and start analyzing the data.
- You can also put together a pivot table (with the row set to Time and the value set to average impressions on Twitter) to compare the average impressions of tweets based on the time of day.
The engagement rate helps you to determine when your followers are most engaged during the day. To find this data, you need to filter your exported data, and with the resulting cells, grab the engagement rate and mark it in a separate worksheet. You can use this data to schedule your tweets when your users are most active.
You can also calculate the different engagement types (e.g., clicks, retweets, and replies) by the time of day.
Hashtag Comparison
Hashtags help drive engagement and reach for your content. To find this data, filter your spreadsheet with a quick search of the tweet text containing the desired hashtag. Select the key metrics you want to track, like average Twitter impressions, engagement, and engagement rates, and compute their averages in a separate worksheet.
Bonus Tip: Do the same steps above to compare other hashtags and add the stats to your worksheet.
Key Takeaways
Twitter Analytics is a potent tool for expanding your reach and engagement, whether you’re targeting a B2B or B2C audience. Monitor key metrics like follower growth or loss, impressions, and user demographics to get the most out of your Twitter campaigns.
Twitter Analytics provides data that can:
- Solidify your campaign goals with numbers
- Better gauge your tweet performance
- Help you leverage statistics for more accurate competitor analysis
- Drive better engagement and impressions as you monitor the audience’s preference
- Help you adapt to the ever-changing trends on the app
- Guide your future strategies and employ best practices