Are you checking your analytics?
Besides native Twitter Analytics, there are a host of other Twitter analytics tools you can use to measure your effectiveness on Twitter.
Having an account on any social media platform as a business and not using their insights and analytics tools is pretty pointless from a marketing perspective.
If you’re using Facebook as a business, (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) you’re probably adept at checking your Facebook Insights for your page and keeping track of what kind of reach and engagement your posts are getting each week or month.
But are you doing the same on Twitter?
Most platforms have their own native analytics tool – Facebook has Facebook Insights, Twitter has Twitter Analytics and Instagram has Instagram Analytics – so there is no excuse not to be keeping an eye on them regularly.
We’re going to dive into some of the really useful features you can find in Twitter Analytics and how you can use this crucial data to grow your followers and increase engagement on your account.
Account Home
For a high level overview of each month’s activity and highlights, make your Account Home page your first stop when checking up on your latest Twitter Analytics stats.
At a glance, you’ll be able to see your top tweet of the month, your top mention by another user, your top media tweet (a tweet with a photo or video) and your top follower that month (the one with the most followers themselves).
If your top follower is someone you admire or have been following yourself, now is a great time to reach out to them. You could simply tweet them and thank them for following you, say something witty if you’re so inclined or even approach them for an interview or collaboration – whatever is relevant for your business and theirs.
Encouraging more engagement with your top tweets can help you to build a more loyal and respected following on Twitter. If these tweets did well once, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t again (provided the content is fairly evergreen). Retweet your top tweets, add new text to them if needed and thank any new followers for following you as a courtesy.
Top Tweets
Navigating to the Tweets section of your Twitter Analytics will show all your tweets for the period selected in chronological order. Clicking on Top Tweets will order your tweets by number of impressions from highest to lowest.
It’s a quick way to see which of your tweets were most popular during the time period you’ve chosen. Finding your most popular tweets will help you to determine what kind of content works well with your Twitter audience. This in turn helps when it comes to planning your Twitter strategy and what to tweet for maximum reach and engagement.
Tweet Activity
Next, click on ‘View Tweet Activity’ on any tweet and you’ll get even more data about that particular tweet, including how many profile clicks you had from it, how many likes, replies, link clicks and hashtag clicks that tweet had too.
Retweets are probably the most valuable type of engagement you can get on Twitter – a quick thank you tweet is a good way to show your appreciation and start building a social relationship with that person. If they can see you engaging with them, it makes them much more likely to engage with you again in the future.
Audience Insights
You can get heaps of different data from the audience insights in Twitter Analytics. You can see your followers age ranges, location, gender and interests.
Interests is a particularly good metric to keep an eye on. If, like many other Twitter users, you use your account to tweet about a range of topics, knowing the main interests of your audience can help you determine what content will resonate best with your audience.
It could also help you decide where you want to focus your efforts, for example do you want to keep tweeting on topics your audience wants to hear about, or do you want to attract new followers with new interests by tweeting about other topics.
Twitter Analytics Tools
Besides native Twitter Analytics, there are a host of other Twitter analytics tools you can use to measure your effectiveness on Twitter. Some are free and some are paid so let’s take a look at a few different options.
Hootsuite, as well as allowing you to schedule posts, gives you analytics data on the platforms you’re using it for. It has a variety of reports including follower growth, mentions, retweets, and an aggregate of key metrics over a time period. And it’s free for up to 3 platforms so you can get some great analytics data from Hootsuite.
Twitonomy is another Twitter analytics program which shares a ton of data with you. There is a free version which allows you to see at a glance how many tweets you’ve written, how many lists you’ve been added to, and how many times you’ve been mentioned in other people’s tweets over a given date range. It even lists the most influential people who have mentioned you which is great to see at a glance.
Buffer is a popular social media scheduling tool which also offers powerful analytics data for the platforms you use it for. Buffer has an Analysis report which you can see on your dashboard, and this shows your most popular tweets. You can then quickly and easily reshare these tweets by dragging and dropping them into your scheduling section. You can also see who has retweeted your tweets and to how many followers – this gives you an idea of just how many people your tweet has reached via retweeting.
