Twitter is a renowned microblogging social media platform that has been a preferred choice for brands to stay connected with their respective target audiences.
Businesses worldwide use Twitter to engage their current and potential customers by sharing the latest updates about the solutions they offer and other relevant information.
Twitter’s acquisition and rebranding may have caused a slight drop in its popularity among celebrities and influencers.
However, it’s still one of the leading social media platforms best suited for running marketing campaigns and generating traction.
It’s essential to keep an eye on your performance and see if your efforts are paying off. This helps you optimize your marketing campaigns and drive the best results from your initiatives.
This article showcases the key Twitter metrics you should track to assess your performance and get the desired results from your activities on the platform.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Importance of Twitter marketing
Twitter is one of the mainstream social media platforms, with over 330 million active users worldwide.
A well-thought-out Twitter marketing strategy can help you generate awareness about your brand and grow your reputation online.
You can also leverage the platform to boost your reach, make personalized content accessible, improve brand recognition, and capture quality leads to grow your conversions.
To get the best results from Twitter marketing, it’s important to do your research and create different buyer personas. Next, you strive to engage your target audience by sharing relevant content and updates about your offerings.
Over 35.7% of Twitter users leverage the platform to research different brands and the solutions they offer. So, you can consider running promotional campaigns on the platform and attracting prospects by offering discounts and exclusive deals.
You can also use Twitter to research your competitors and learn about emerging industry trends. These insights help you pivot and optimize your marketing strategy.
However, you need to constantly assess your performance and monitor your progress to get the best results from the platform.
Key Twitter metrics to track
There are a number of metrics that can help you gauge your performance on Twitter. The following are a few of the most important ones that you should monitor:
1. Profile visits
Businesses use Twitter to generate awareness about the brand and drive more traction through the platform. Tracking profile visits shows you how successful you are at it.
If your profile visits increase over time, it shows that with each passing day, an increasing number of people are interested in learning more about your brand. So, they visit your profile to explore relevant information.
It also indicates the possibility of you acknowledging an increase in your followers, as people visiting your profile may also consider following you to stay connected. You can easily track this metric by accessing Twitter Analytics from your desktop.
2. Followers
The number of followers you have on Twitter reflects your reach and authority on the platform. So, tracking this metric tells you about your growth over time.
An increase in the number of followers shows that the intended audience is interested in the updates or the content that you share on the platform.
Just ensure that the growth of your followers is organic. For this, you have to consistently share valuable information through the platform to engage a relevant audience.
A lot of brands don’t mind purchasing new followers to display their authority. This does more harm than good, as the followers acquired through such tactics aren’t likely interested in what you have to say or offer.
If you see consistent growth in your followers organically, it means that your content strategy is paying off. The information you are sharing through the platform is getting you more eyeballs and paving the way for you to build authority.
You can track your followers through Twitter’s native analytics dashboard and assess your performance.
3. Reach
Reach is an important metric that you should track to measure your performance on social media. It represents the potential of your message to be conveyed to a certain number of people.
Your Twitter reach depends on the number of followers you have and the hashtags you use for your campaigns.
If you have a strong following and leverage hashtags followed by a huge portion of your target audience, you’re likely to cast a wider net.
You can’t access this metric directly through Twitter Analytics. However, you can calculate the reach of your campaign or your Twitter activities manually, or track this using a social media analytics tool – like Keyhole.
To calculate the reach of your tweets, you can simply divide the number of impressions for a particular tweet or an entire campaign by the number of followers you have and multiply the number you get by 100.
The same goes for hashtags. If you want to calculate your reach when using a particular hashtag, you should divide the impressions representing a particular tweet or a campaign by the number of people following the hashtag and multiply the number you get by 100.
Reach showcases deliverability and indicates that the information you share aligns with the interests of your target audience.
4. Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times your target audience saw your tweet or could successfully access the information shared with them.
Impressions do not represent unique views. For example, if an individual saw your tweet 10 times, the system would count it as 10 impressions.
The growing number of impressions indicates how impressive your content strategy has been thus far. It shows that Twitter’s algorithm considers the information you share highly relevant and makes it readily accessible to the intended audience.
Impressions fuel thought leadership and brand recall. Seeing the information shared by you frequently in the feed makes the intended audience curious, and they’ll want to learn more about your brand or the solutions you offer.
You can track your impressions by accessing Twitter Analytics and keeping an eye on your performance on the social media platform.
5. Engagement
Engagement represents any type of interaction that Twitter users have had with the content you shared with them.
It includes favorites, replies, retweets, link clicks, hashtag clicks, mention clicks, and so on. Even when a user clicks to expand your tweet, it counts as engagement.
Growing engagement indicates the success of your content strategy and your authority as a brand. It shows that you are a go-to information source for the intended audience, and they likely keep coming back to you for their daily dose of content.
Engagement is a mainstream performance assessment indicator for social media. So, keeping an eye on it is highly recommended. However, calculating the engagement rate enables you to dive a bit deeper and gain more visibility.
Twitter calculates the engagement rate by taking the sum of all indicators representing engagement, such as favorites, retweets, replies, etc. It then divides the number by the number of followers, and multiplies it by 100.
6. Brand mentions
Brand mentions indicate the number of times Twitter users mention your brand in their tweets. These users can be individuals or other brands.
Tracking brand mentions is an excellent way of assessing your popularity or presence on the platform. It’s also an excellent way to manage your reputation online.
Tracking mentions showcasing positive experiences enables you to leverage user-generated content and fuel social proof.
Keeping an eye on mentions representing negative experiences is also important, as 96% of people actively look for negative reviews about brands. So, catering to the concerns of your audience is essential, as it helps you establish a strong bond with your current and potential customers.
You can track your brand mentions through Twitter Analytics and check the total number of mentions in a particular time frame.
7. Audience sentiment
Audience sentiment dictates the perception of your current and potential customers about the solutions you offer.
It helps you monitor how people see you as a brand and manage your reputation online. Keeping an eye on audience sentiment enables you to track the change in public opinion over time and take appropriate measures accordingly.
If the overall audience sentiment is skewed towards the positive side, it means that your marketing and branding efforts are paying off.
Assessing audience sentiment can be a daunting process, as you can’t monitor the data through Twitter Analytics.
You need to manually assess your brand mentions and see if the overall vibe you get from the tweet is positive or negative.
You can also try Keyhole for sentiment analysis and effortlessly avoid reputation management crises.
8. Hashtag performance
Hashtags play a key role in boosting your reach and conveying your message to the intended audience.
Whether it’s the custom hashtags or the ones representing the latest trends in your respective industry, monitoring their performance dictates the success of your Twitter marketing strategy.
The goal here is to identify the hashtags that complement your content strategy and help you drive the best results.
One size doesn’t fit all. The key to enhancing your reach and brand recognition through hashtags is trying different options and seeing what works for you.
Assessing hashtag performance makes it easier for you to make necessary changes to your Twitter marketing strategy, whether your goal is to gain more followers or enhance your reach.
Keyhole’s Hashtag Analytics feature makes it easy for you and helps you access useful insights to optimize your campaigns.
9. Link clicks
Link clicks represent the number of times users of the platform clicked on the links added to your tweets.
Tracking this metric is important because it shows the effectiveness of the content you share through the platform.
If you see an increasing trend in link clicks, it means that you are able to engage your target audience through your tweets and convince them to consider the intended action.
You can see link clicks through Twitter Analytics and track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
10. Click-through rate
If you have an online presence, the end goal of your marketing campaigns is to drive relevant traffic to your platform. So, click-through rate is an important metric that you should always consider tracking.
This indicator gives you more detailed insights compared to link clicks. It tells you how many people, among the ones who clicked your links, actually visited your platform or saw the message you wanted to convey.
It shows not only the effectiveness of your message delivery but also indicates the relevance of the content shared.
To calculate the click-through rate, you need to divide link clicks by the number of impressions and then multiply the number by 100.
Track Twitter metrics using Keyhole
Tracking all essential metrics to assess your Twitter performance can be daunting. Some of them can be easily accessed through Twitter Analytics, whereas you may have to do some calculations for the others or leverage online solutions.
Keyhole is a one-stop solution that facilitates your access to relevant insights and enables you to track all essential Twitter metrics on a single screen.
You don’t have to leverage different solutions or do manual calculations to gauge the performance of your marketing campaigns. You can keep an eye on all important indicators hassle-free and keep optimizing your campaigns in real-time to drive the best results.
Wrapping up
There you have it: these are the key Twitter metrics you should track to assess your performance and get the best results. If you’ve been wanting to measure your success on Twitter and see if your efforts are paying off, keeping an eye on the recommended metrics will help you reach your goals.
The native Twitter analytics dashboard will help by giving you a general overview, but if you want to get the most from your metrics, you need a tool like Keyhole. Keyhole is a simple and effective way to see and understand how people are engaging with your posts, which can help you improve your strategy and connect with more potential customers than ever before.
If you’re ready to take the next step, try Keyhole for yourself. We are confident that the insights you’ll get from our detailed reports will be a total game-changer for your business.
Author Bio
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are Twitter metrics?
Twitter metrics encompass different indicators that showcase the effectiveness of your marketing and promotional efforts on the platform.
2. Which Twitter metrics should I track?
In this article, we have recommended the key metrics that you should track to assess your performance. However, the recommendations are not use-case-specific. So, you should also do some digging at your end and explore if there are any other indicators that can facilitate your access to relevant insights.
3. Where can I access essential Twitter metrics?
You can track standard Twitter metrics through the platform’s analytics dashboard. For more advanced-level metrics, you may have to consider doing manual calculations or leveraging online solutions that can help you gauge your social media success.
