After 14 long years of innovation and growth, Twitter has solidified its market position, and it keeps on innovating. For marketers, it’s a gold mine for customer insights, opportunities to build an online community, grow your brand, and drive sales revenue.
However, breaking through the noise is a tough task, even for experienced marketers. That’s where social media analytics come into play. Social media analytics are a vital source of strategic insights that help businesses optimize their strategy and achieve the desired results.
Using Twitter analytics, marketers can gather vital information to step up their overall Twitter marketing strategy and maximize ROI.
Not sure where to start? This guide will walk you through how to use Twitter analytics, which metrics to track, and how you can leverage them to improve your Twitter strategy.
What Is Twitter Analytics?
The key to Twitter success is building a long-term Twitter marketing strategy from the ground up, and Twitter analytics is the place to find the data that can inform your strategy. With insights on content performance and audience behaviors, it allows businesses to track what resonates with their audience and what doesn’t.
Providing information on tweets’ engagement, clicks, retweets, replies, and more, Twitter analytics is the set of data insights that help teams understand how the audience ticks, and how to engage them.
Which Twitter Metrics Should You Track?
Twitter analytics tools provide a wealth of information that can make it tricky not to get lost in a sea of metrics. Below is a breakdown of the most important metrics you can find within Twitter analytics natively and via third-party analytics tools like Socialbakers:
Top tweet
To get started, use the top tweets metric to see your best post of the month and then look at top tweets that have received the most impressions over time. Seeing all your best-performing tweets side by side helps to aggregate learnings and identify patterns.
Do the tweets have a common theme? Did they contain a hashtag, emoji, mention, or a specific call to action? Apply these tried-and-tested learnings to craft more successful content in the future.
Follower growth
To get a better understanding of how the audience is developing over time, look into follower growth. Follower growth shows how your Twitter following has increased (or decreased) over time, and how many new followers you’ve acquired. Notice unusual spikes or anomalies? Revisit your activity on those days to try and determine the cause.
To identify the most influential followers, dive into Top Follower. This metric reveals the user with the highest follower count that followed you in the past month. While they might not have retweeted your content yet, keep these users on the radar for future influencer or brand advocacy collaborations.
Impressions
Impressions are the total number of times a tweet appeared on users' feeds. (Don’t confuse impressions with reach, which indicate the number of unique users that saw the given tweet.) Impressions help to understand if the total number of people who viewed your tweet is increasing or decreasing. Capitalize on this information by repurposing tweets that gained a lot of attention, or create tweets on similar topics.
While Twitter analytics gives you the summary of impressions over time, in Socialbakers, you can go one step further: to understand particular spikes or dips in impressions, click on the day and identify the specific tweets that have caused it.
Interactions and engagement
While high impressions might look exciting, the number doesn’t show you if and how users engaged with your content. That’s why it’s crucial to look at impressions in relation to engagement.
Engagement (number of times a user has interacted with your tweet), or engagement rate (interactions divided by followers x 100) help you understand what type of content urges the audience to get in touch.
While it helps to analyze overall engagement, you might also want to understand if most of your followers interacted via likes, replies, or retweets – this can easily be visualized in Socialbakers.
Video Content Performance
While video content is on the rise across all platforms, this was particularly the case for Twitter. In Q2 2020, more than 20% of tweets from brand pages contained a video. Keeping up with that content requires following social media video best practices, and then measuring media views and total engagement to see how people respond to your videos.
Results, conversions, and CPR
These are the metrics you need to consider when it comes to understanding your paid efforts. The results metric indicates how many users take actions that align with your campaign objectives. As such, it’s an essential way to determine if an ad is delivering on your objective or not.
Setting the right objective also sets the cornerstone for measuring your cost per result (CPR). It’s an average of how much you pay for each action a user takes after seeing an ad. If that particular action isn’t taken, you won’t be charged.
Finally, conversions show how many people perform a desired action outside the Twittersphere after viewing and engaging with your ad. Use conversions to measure which campaigns drive actions such as site visits, sign-ups, and purchases.
How to Turn Twitter Analytics Into Actionable Insights
Now, after learning the key metrics you want to consider for analysis, let’s turn to understanding how to make this data actionable. How can Twitter analytics directly inform your strategy and make your Twitter presence a success?
Take stock of your Twitter presence – holistically
Having several Twitter accounts can be a strategic choice for large corporations with several product divisions or brands being present in different regional markets. Evaluating individual performance is essential, but it's equally important to understand the profiles' aggregated performance.
That’s when Socialbakers comes in handy. While Twitter native only allows analyzing one profile at a time, in Socialbakers, users can group several profiles and track overall Twitter performance across all their profiles.
Identify top-performing content and replicate success
When building a Twitter strategy, you want to pinpoint best-performing tweets and identify success patterns. Looking at impressions, engagement, and interactions, you can learn what type of content lands particularly well with your followers and create future content based on this knowledge.
Find the best time to tweet
As a platform that focuses on short, real-time information sharing, it’s crucial to identify the right times to post on Twitter. While you might be located in one part of the world, your followers are likely to be global, so the best posting time might not be that obvious.
While Twitter native analytics shows engagement rates on specific days, it doesn’t have breakdowns per hour or day. In the Socialbakers platform, you can see user activity by day of the week and even hour of the day.
Tailor content to your audience
Understanding the audience is one of the guiding principles for marketers. Twitter ads manager helps organizations get a clearer picture of who their followers are, understanding age, gender, location, household income, and even buying styles.
Alongside information about their top interests, these insights can help you craft tweets that speak directly to your ideal customer.
Identify and vet influencers and brand ambassadors
With the top follower metric, track those individuals in your network that have the biggest potential audience. Follow back and engage with them to strengthen ties and keep the relationship alive for future brand advocate and influencer marketing campaigns.
In Socialbakers, getting into the right conversations with the right people is straightforward. Let the platform do the heavy lifting to view all incoming content, and to vet and compare influencer performance with ease.
Create reports to share your knowledge
To check back on your data and compare performance over time, don’t forget to export it regularly. Exports are great for providing management with clear and precise performance reports and for sharing knowledge with colleagues. With a simple exporting function, monthly reports are right at your fingertips.
If you’re reporting on a quarterly or weekly basis, third-party providers like Socialbakers could be ideal, allowing you to adjust time frames more flexibly and even schedule reports to your email inbox automatically.
Analyze the competition to stay ahead of the game
Followers never see your tweets in isolation, but right next to those of other brands, including competitors. Analyzing your competitors’ Twitter accounts helps refine your own: learn from their gaps, get inspired, and create a strategy that’s unique to your brand.
Competitive benchmarking is currently unavailable in Twitter’s native analytics but can be pulled with Socialbakers, where you can compare yourself against a competitor, or even against the whole industry.
Measure impact towards your overall social media strategy
Consider your Twitter performance in a broader social context to understand the bigger picture. By comparing results across all social media platforms, you can identify gaps and find opportunities to maximize the impact of individual platforms. Tying Twitter to the wider social ecosystem creates a more consistent experience for your followers, and it improves decision-making for the Twitter strategy itself.
While analyzing Twitter next to other social media platforms can’t be done in the native Twitter analytics, you can pull this information from third-party tools like Socialbakers.
Validate your Twitter spend
When promoting tweets to attract eyeballs, marketers need to ensure they’re making good use of their money. Let data guide your investment decisions and optimize your tweets to get the most out of every dollar you spend.
The Takeaway
To sum it up, businesses that want to survive and thrive in the rapidly evolving social media landscape need to continuously monitor the market and quickly adapt to their customers' ever-changing needs.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media success, tracking your Twitter metrics will give you the resources you need to step up the Twitter game. Don’t let seemingly massive amounts of data scare you. When accurately collected, organized, and analyzed, you can turn this data into an invaluable strategic asset.
So, if Twitter analytics isn’t already a part of your social media strategy, this guide gives you some of the fundamental tips and strategies to get started. Over time, work those insights into your Twitter marketing strategy to make well-thought business decisions that set you up for measurable social media success.
While Twitter’s own analytics is a great place to get started, third-party tools like Socialbakers provide even deeper data insights and allow you to manage Twitter alongside all your other social networks.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
