Despite tweeting a zillion times a day, do you fail to see that spike you anticipated? Don’t stress, you aren’t alone!
Most likely, you’ve already turned to how-to blogs, attended Nailing Twitter Marketing webinars, and subscribed to random newsletters for newer and better social media insights.
And while these are all great resources, the most valuable insights are most often found directly within your social data.
Twitter Analytics is the ultimate source that will reveal the social media insight you actually need.
When your goal is to grow your Twitter audience, there’s so much to be learned from the people who already follow you—but most marketers ignore their Twitter Analytics because they feel they don’t need them.
If you’re unsure where to start regarding Twitter Analytics, this guide is for you. We’ll discuss the following:
- Basics of Twitter Analytics
- Benefits of tracking Twitter Analytics
- Key Twitter Analytics metrics
- Top Twitter Analytics tools
Without any further ado, let’s dive in with the simplest topic.
Twitter Analytics Explained
While Twitter isn’t the most crowded social platform out there, it’s still the go-to platform for live conversations about news, TV, and sports.
There’s a reason it’s such a status symbol to be verified on Twitter. It took businesses almost a decade to figure out “how to Twitter” effectively, but marketers finally learned that Twitter isn’t an advertising platform—it’s a conversation platform.
Once you start truly engaging with your audience, you unlock an indispensable business intelligence tool: Twitter Analytics.
Twitter Analytics, originally launched in 2014, is Twitter’s native analytics dashboard where you can track your Twitter performance and unlock insights about your audience.
With Twitter Analytics, you can track top tweets, impressions, profile visits, mentions, followers, and more.
So why should businesses spend valuable time digging into their Twitter Analytics? Let’s find out!
Why Do You Need Twitter Analytics
Analyzing your Twitter metrics will give you an answer to the questions that are key to boosting traffic and sales.
1. Learn what your audience wants
Twitter removed data about audience demographics in early 2020 but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn about your audience.
You can dive deeper into the kind of products, content, and copy that resonates with them the most by looking at your engagement rate, mentions, and social shares.
By looking at your top content, you can make educated guesses about what made a particular tweet stand out among thousands of other tweets that showed up on your followers’ feeds at that very second!
For example, you may find your audience responds more to tweets with videos than plain text.
The more data you analyze, the easier it will be to notice behavior patterns and see what exactly makes your audience tick.
2. Learn when to tweet
This one’s simple:
To enhance engagement, find out when your customers are online, and post during those specific time windows.
While Twitter has added features like Top Tweets and Moments to help great tweets linger on timelines for longer, the reality is that most tweets have a short lifespan.
It’s safe to say that getting the timing right is an indispensable part of the entire Twitter success puzzle that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Twitter Analytics can help you figure out the best time to post so that you can build an optimal tweeting schedule.
3. Track your performance over time
Not only can you track your content performance at the level of individual tweets, you can also track your overall account performance over time. This will allow you to conduct a Twitter account audit.
Depending on how long your account has been active, Twitter can give you potentially years of data—allowing you to see which time periods were most effective for your account.
Then, you can match up your content plans or campaigns from those time periods to determine what strategies worked best for your account—whether it was an influencer campaign, a hashtag campaign,
Now that you’re convinced tracking your Twitter analytics is worth it, let’s start by showing you how.
How To Use Twitter Analytics
To access Twitter Analytics, start by logging into your Twitter account. Then, click the More… menu, followed by Analytics.
Boom, you’re in.
You can also access Twitter Analytics directly at analytics.twitter.com.
Once you’re logged in, you’ll see Twitter Analytics organizes your stats into four sections: Home, Tweets, Videos, and Conversion tracking.
The first section is your Twitter report card, which gives you an overview of your monthly performance, as well as top-performing tweets and top influencers within your network.
The Tweet activity dashboard will show metrics related to the performance of past Tweets: impressions, engagements, engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, replies, and more.
The Videos dashboard allows you to track the performance of your videos, including metrics on video views, completion rate, total minutes viewed, and retention rate.
Finally, the Conversion Tracking dashboard allows you to track website and mobile app events based on a tag you’d install on your website or app.
There’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s break down the most important metrics.
Top Twitter Analytics Metrics
1. Tweets
On the Home dashboard, Twitter will tell you how many tweets you published in a month. This can be helpful to make sure you hit your daily content publishing goals.
2. Profile visits
Twitter also gives you a monthly total of your profile visits, which is the number of times people visit your profile and feed.
Tracking this over time is a good indication of whether people take the step beyond simply interacting with one of your tweets to check out if you’re worth a follow.
3. Followers
Twitter Analytics also gives you a monthly breakdown of how many followers you gained or lost, as well as your current follower count.
While growing your follower count is great, it’s best to focus on metrics that more directly impact the bottom line, like engagements and link clicks. It doesn’t do much good to gain followers if they don’t interact with your content.
4. Top Tweet
A top tweet is your most-viewed tweet within a single month. There are two ways a top tweet can amplify your success.
First, analyzing your top tweet allows you to find out what makes content relevant and valuable to your audience.
And second, since you are certain that this particular tweet resonates with people, you may want to consider promoting it to give it a further boost. If you’re going to pay to boost your content, you may as well boost the best content, right?
5. Top Mention
Your top mention is the @ mention of your account that received the most engagements. Why should you care?
A Twitter user who’s already interacting with your brand – and gaining lots of attention for it – may serve as a great influencer or ambassador.
It will, also, give you a hint as to what type of content you can create that will generate the most buzz from your audience (whether it’s positive or negative).
6. Top Follower
Twitter Analytics also shows you the top follower with the highest follower count that started following you within the month.
This follower may also serve as a potential influencer or collaboration opportunity.
7. Top Media Tweet
Similar to your Top Tweet, your top media tweet shows off your photo or video tweet that earned the most impressions within the month.
8. Impressions
Twitter impressions are the number of times a tweet was seen on someone’s Twitter feed. You can access impressions at the account level over a time period, or at the individual tweet level.
Impressions are a measure of reach, allowing you to see what type of content earns you the most eyeballs.
9. Engagements
Twitter engagements are the total number of interactions with a tweet, including clicks on any element of the tweet, retweets, likes, replies, or follows.
From the Tweets dashboard, Twitter will also break down your engagements by:
- Engagement rate
- Link clicks
- Retweets without comments
- Likes
- Replies
These metrics are available as daily totals, monthly totals, and monthly averages.
However, engagements on their own don’t tell you much, because they’re often correlated with impressions—tweets that are shared and seen more are going to be interacted with more.
That’s where engagement rate comes in handy.
10. Engagement Rate
Divide your Twitter engagements by your impressions. This will give you the engagement rate.
This is the rate at which people interact with your tweet or tweets.
The engagement rate is extremely useful when it comes to understanding what drives people to interact with your brand. This is especially true if you’re interested in driving traffic and sales directly from Twitter.
Analyze the tweets that earn the highest engagement rates and think about what made them successful. Was it a hashtag? A question? A video?
11. Website & Mobile App Events
By installing a conversion-tracking tag on your website or mobile app, you can push back data on website and/or app conversions back into your Twitter Analytics dashboard.
This tracking tag is vital for any paid Twitter ad campaign, as your tracking tag will build up an audience base to whom you can target your ads.
Key Twitter Ads Metrics
While Twitter technically splits its Twitter Ads campaigns from its main Twitter Analytics dashboards, it’s important to know which metrics are available to advertisers, should you decide to go the paid route.
The campaign dashboard is accessible at ads.twitter.com. If you haven’t set up an ad campaign yet, you’ll have to do so before you can access any analytics.
The campaign dashboard allows you to track impressions, engagement rates, results, and cost-per-result.
1. Results
What are Twitter results? They certainly sound like something we should be aiming for…
Results is a generic term for the campaign objective you set for your ad campaign. They can be a measure of:
- Reach
- Video views
- Pre-roll views
- App installs
- Website clicks
- Engagements
- Followers
- App re-engagements
2. Cost-per-result
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the cost-per-result is your Twitter ad spend divided by the number of results you achieved.
It can be thought of similarly to cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-conversion.
3 Best Twitter Analytics Tools For Your Business In 2024
While the native Twitter Analytics platform can be an important (and free) tool in your digital marketing toolkit, the platform certainly has major shortcomings.
It’s extremely limited in how you can access the data. You may want to get more fine-grained than daily data, and you may want to more easily access data on your audience—especially when it comes to identifying potential influencers.
Here are the top Twitter analytics tools that will give you more powerful insights into your Twitter data.
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is the go-to influencer marketing, social listening, and social media analytics tool for individuals and companies looking to understand what topics and types of posts attract their audience’s attention.
Keyhole’s real-time hashtag analytics and keyword tracking feature enable users to:
- Monitor and manage social conversations and brand sentiment
- Identify top influencers
- Find trending topics
- Track and aggregate events and campaign data
- Research live and historical data
- Analyze your competitors
- Easily share in-depth reports with your team
Ultimately, Keyhole empowers users to optimize their content and posting schedule, plan more engaging future campaigns, and make more informed decisions about their brand’s social media strategy.
Price: Custom
2. Sprout Social
While it’s best known as a social media management tool, Sprout Social also offers a Twitter analytics solution.
Using Sprout Social, you can find your top-performing content and compare your stats to your competitors.
Sprout Social also has social listening and engagement features that make it a popular choice among marketers.
Price: A Sprout Social subscription starts at $249 per month.
3. Hootsuite
No list of social media tools is complete without mentioning Hootsuite.
Mostly used as a social media management tool, Hootsuite can also be used to assess one’s social media activity and impact, track and boost responsiveness. Also, it brings all social media platforms together into a single custom report that can be easily exported and shared within your organization.
Price: Hootsuite starts at $99 per month.
Stop Ignoring Your Twitter Analytics
Social media platforms like Twitter give organizations access to incredible amounts of data. When accurately collected, organized, and analyzed, these can be turned into an invaluable strategic asset.
If we sum up everything we talked about in this exhaustive Twitter analytics guide, we can determine five ways social listening and Twitter analytics can help you elevate your business:
- Understand what your customers want and need
- Find trending topics to drive future campaigns
- Identify potential partnerships and influencers
- Analyze brand sentiment and reduce your crisis response time
- Keep an eye on the competition and keep ahead of the game
In short, Twitter analytics tools can help in the quest of giving your Twitter data a purpose and turning it into actionable insights that you can use to make well-thought business decisions and come up with a competitive marketing strategy.
Keyhole can help you take your Twitter analytics analysis to the next level.
Related Articles:
11 Free + Paid Twitter Analytics Tools For Agencies & Brands In 2024
Top 17 Facebook Analytics Tools To Measure Page Performance
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How to access Twitter analytics?
To access Twitter Analytics,
1. Start by logging into your Twitter account.
2. Click the More from the menu.
3. Tap on Analytics.
2. What analytics should I track on Twitter?
Here are a few analytics metrics you should track on Twitter:
1. Tweets
2. Profile visits
3. Followers
4. Top tweet
5. Top mention
6. Top follower
7. Top media tweet
8. Impression
9. Engagements
10. Engagement rate
11. Webiste & Mobile App Events
3. How do I use Twitter analytics complete guide for marketers?
With Twitter analytics complete guide for marketers, you can:
1. Understand what your customers want and need
2. Find trending topics to drive future campaigns
3. Identify potential partnerships and influencers
4. Analyze brand sentiment and reduce your crisis response time
5. Keep an eye on the competition and keep ahead of the game
