Many brands use Twitter to successfully promote their businesses. It is very important to track Twitter metrics so that you can come to know about your followers, their numbers, and how to maintain and analyze your growth. This article will help you to understand how your posts affect your audience and how to improve engagement and growth.
You can also get the detail of your followers and those who are not following you. There are some ways to track your followers so that you can maintain the number of your followers. If you are new to twitter we suggest you get started with our informative post: Getting started on Twitter for Marketing
Contents
Benefits of using Twitter analytics
1. Learn about your audience
Knowing your audience is one of the most important guiding principles for every social media marketer.
Understanding your audience’s age, gender, household income, language, and geography helps you craft content that will be relevant to them. With any platform, it’s good to start by familiarizing yourself with overall audience demographics.
This can be especially helpful if you’re a new brand without much of an audience to analyze yet. But it’s just a start. Your specific audience might look very different from Twitter’s general audience.
You need to understand the demographics of the people who have specifically chosen to follow you on this network. Twitter analytics can help you conduct this critical audience research as you grow your brand and your following.
In addition to core demographic categories, Twitter analytics gives you information about your followers’ interests, what devices they use, their behavior, and the keywords they search. You’ll see from the screencap above that my followers’ top interest is dogs.
2. Find out what content resonates
Twitter data shows that Tweets with video get 10 times more engagements than Tweets without. But you can’t just assume this applies to your specific audience. Maybe your audience prefers Tweets with photos or infographics or maybe they love gifs. Please read our helpful guide to Best Content for Twitter Marketing for great ideas and best content practices.
By keeping an eye on Twitter engagement metrics, you can learn precisely what connects with your followers, so you can develop a Twitter strategy that speaks directly to them.
3. Post at optimal times
The best time to post on social media is whenever your audience is most likely to see and engage with your content. This is especially true for Twitter, where it’s easy for users to choose to view tweets chronologically rather than in an algorithmic feed. That’s one reason why the lifespan of a tweet averages only about 18 minutes.
Twitter analytics tools give you loads of great data to help you figure out when your audience is most likely to be online. The most important thing is to find out where most of your followers live. You can get a breakdown by country, and by state or region.
You can also look at what devices your audience uses. This will tell you whether to try to reach people while they’re commuting or if you should stick to business hours.
Use this information as a starting point and do some simple testing to see what times get the most effective engagement.
4. See if your Ads are working
Twitter analytics can show you how your paid ads compare to your organic tweets, so you can see how much your ad dollars are expanding your reach overall. You can also use Twitter analytics tools to compare the effectiveness of different promoted tweets. For example, Twitter data shows that overall, shorter video ads are the most memorable. Twitter campaign information can be found in our guide: How to Setup a Twitter Ad Campaign in 2020.
Important Twitter metrics to track
There are three main categories of Twitter metrics:
- Account metrics apply to your overall Twitter profile and your follower base
- Individual tweet metrics track the engagement numbers for specific tweets
- Ad metrics track how well promoted tweets perform, from vanity metrics right through to conversions and ROI
Top account metrics
You’ll find these metrics on the Home tab of your Twitter analytics dashboard. They’re reported monthly.
1. Top tweet
What it measures: The tweet that earned the most impressions for a given month. Why it matters: Since this tweet reached your largest audience, it’s a good example of what you’re doing right. That could be tweeting at the right time of day, using the right hashtags, including great targeted content that encouraged reshares, or all of the above. You may want to consider Quick Promoting this tweet to extend its reach even further—or at least noting its success so you can replicate it in the future.
2. New followers
What it measures: The number of new account followers in a particular month.
Why it matters: A follow is a longer-term engagement than a like or retweet, so if you see your follower count climbing, it’s a good overall sign that your Twitter strategy is working. If it’s fallen, on the other hand, take note of potential causes and try to correct them.
3. Top follower
What it measures: The top follower of the month, with the highest number of their own followers.
Why it matters: While this person has not necessarily shared your content yet, they have the largest potential audience. That means your top followers hold the greatest potential to broaden the exposure of your tweets through retweets and comments.
You’ll likely want to follow back your top follower each month and keep them on your radar for potential influencer and brand advocacy campaigns.
4. Top Mention
What it measures: The tweet with the most impressions of the month in which another Twitter user tagged you.
Why it matters: Take a close look here—is this a positive mention or a negative one? If it’s a positive mention or content share, be sure to thank the person and keep them on your radar for future collaboration. After all, they expanded your reach more than any other Twitter user this month.
If it’s a negative mention, reach out to the person to see what you can do to repair the relationship.
5. Top tweet metrics
After a high-level analysis of your account’s performance, these are the Twitter analytics you should focus on for your tweets. You can view and track these metrics for individual tweets, or for all your tweets in a selected period.
6. Engagements
What it measures: Engagement is a count of how many times people interacted with your tweet. This includes everything from tweet expansion to retweets to likes to follow.
Why it matters: If you’re not getting engagement, you’re talking into a void. Tracking which tweets generate the most response is a good way to know what’s working for your brand.
7. Engagement rate
What it measures: The number of engagements divided by the number of impressions a tweet receives.
Why it matters: While the number of engagements is a valuable metric, engagement rate gives a clearer picture of how engaging a Tweet is because it also factors in how many people saw the Tweet.
8. Twitter reach percentage
What it measures: How many of your followers saw any given tweet. You can calculate this yourself by dividing tweet impressions by your total followers.
Why it matters: This pretty much comes down to timing. Knowing how many of your followers are seeing your tweets is a good indicator of whether you’re tweeting at the right times. This can also help you plan a strategy for reporting the same content in different ways to maximize exposure.
You may find that a tweet reaches more people than you have on your follower list, giving you a percentage higher than 100. This means non-followers found you, likely through a retweet, comment, or hashtag. Check these tweets carefully to see what worked so well.
9. Link clicks
What it measures: The number of times Twitter users clicked on a link or website card in your Tweet.
Why it matters: While link clicks are factored into engagement rates, you might also want to track clicks on their own. After all, this is an engagement that moves beyond Twitter itself, with people choosing to interact with your brand content or products.
10. Top Twitter ads metrics Results
What it measures: Results are the desired actions tied to your ad’s customizable objective. Twitter ad results can track a range of objectives, including impressions, followers, engagements, video views, website clicks and conversions, and more.
Why it matters: This is the essential metric for determining whether or not your ad is delivering on the desired outcome of your Twitter campaign. The result is directly tied to the objective you set for the ad. So, for example, if you choose website visits as your goal, the resulting number tracks link clicks.
11. Cost per result (CPR)
What it measures: An average of how much you pay for each relevant action users take after seeing your ad.
Why it matters: Each campaign objective is tied to a billable action that’s only charged when the action occurs. For example, if your campaign objective is video views, you’ll only be charged when someone views your video. Tracking CPR will help you manage your budget and factor into your ROI calculations.
12. Conversions
What it measures: Conversions allow you to track what actions people take on your website and across devices after they see your Twitter ad.
Why it matters: These figures will give you a sense of the path users take from your Twitter ad to your site, right through to conversion.
From your conversion tracking dashboard, you’ll be able to drill down into post-engagement and post-view conversions, transaction values, and total sales. It’s where you’ll mostly clearly see where your tweets deliver on ROI.
How to use Twitter analytics
In the Twitter Analytics dashboard
- From your Twitter home page, click the three dots icon under your avatar, then choose Analytics from the menu. This takes you directly to your Account Home dashboard, where you can track the account metrics described above.
- To access your Tweet Activity dashboard, click the Tweets tab in the top menu, or click View all Tweet activity under your top tweet. From here, you can track the individual tweet metrics described above.
- To access your Campaign dashboard, log into your Twitter Ads account.
Twitter Analytics Tools
Twitter analytics and Hootsuite Analytics give you great insights into your Twitter performance. Here are some additional tools you might want to consider adding to your Tweet tracking arsenal.
1. TweetReach
TweetReach is a great tool to estimate and benchmark against competitors. Its snapshot reports track estimated reach, impressions, and other analytics based on username searches. Reports rely on social intelligence from Union Metrics (an official Twitter partner), so you know it’s legit.
2. SocialRank
SocialRank helps you identify your top followers in terms of engagement and value. It’s a good Twitter analytics tool to help identify potential advocates and influencers.
3. BrandMaxima
BrandMaxima allows you to analyze the performance of your Twitter account and branded hashtags, then benchmark against the competition.
4. Cloohawk
Cloohawk analyzes your Tweets and followers to identify potential actions to improve your results.
5. Tweepsmap
Tweepsmap helps you analyze your Twitter audience. The Twitter metrics provided include the best times to tweet, Twitter engagement, follower growth, and most influential followers.
6. Twitonomy
Twitonomy provides analytics of your own Twitter accounts or someone else’s, so you can check out the competition.
Conclusion
Twitter is a powerful marketing tool and social media platform any business can take advantage of. It can help you direct more traffic to your website, improve brand awareness, engage your audience, create personal relationships with your followers and customers, boost conversions, and increase your sales.
Over 330 million people use Twitter each month. That’s a huge volume of people who can be exposed to your business. Yet with 500 million tweets published daily, you’ll need to do something clever, witty, or funny, to stand out–never mind go viral.
In 2020, Twitter will remain a valuable part of any good marketing strategy. As the platform continues to evolve, it’s important that marketers find ways to change with it.
With the strategies and knowledge provided in this guide, you know everything to get your twitter marketing strategy all set up for driving great sales, business and revenue for your brand.
