Twitter has always been a bit of an enigma in the social media sphere. Unlike many of the other networks, Twitter has stuck to what it does best rather strongly, and it hasn't bowed to pressure to change tact, much like Facebook has over the years.
So, if Twitter is the most unique of the social networks, how can we use it for business, and how can we then analyse and resort on the success of our Twitter marketing campaigns accurately?
This blog is here to answer your questions.
We'll take you through a brief history of Twitter, how it works, how you can utilise the platform for your brand or business, and how to then track your performance to ensure that you are getting the best return on investment. There's a lot to learn, so let's jump in!
What Is Twitter and How Does It Work?
Twitter is a microblogging platform, created in 2006 as a joint project between Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Twitter was based on the idea of SMS (Short messaging service) Messages, limiting the user to just 140 characters for their update.
The four colleagues worked for podcasting company, Odeo, but wanted to branch out into the relatively new idea of Social Networking, currently being made popular by their main rival, Facebook. Twitter launched its service in July of 2006, and, within six years, it had grown in such popularity that it was being used by over 100 million users, who were responsible for sending over 350 million tweets per day.
Twitter's popularity was mainly based on the fact that it was so different from Facebook. Where Facebook was concentrating on connecting friends and family together through a very free and visual media, Twitter found its popularity as a live news curator where users were, and still are, encouraged to share their thoughts with the world in a rapid and quick-fire way.
One of the mantras of Twitter became "if you can't say it in 140 characters, is it really worth saying?". This is a powerful statement and, although Twitter has expanded over the years to 240 characters and added the ability to link tweets together, effectively giving your unlimited characters, it's the main selling point is still that it's a rapid-fire live news curator.
Twitter and Business
Twitter can be, admittedly, a bit hit and miss for businesses. Some businesses do really well on Twitter, but some do not.
There are usually two reasons for this. The first reason, and arguably the main reason, is that the audience on Twitter is not the same as other social networks, Twitter is more focussed towards news and quick updates (making it really popular with politics fans). Many companies don't take this difference of audience into account and can be guilty of sharing the same updates on Twitter as they do on Facebook, which does not work.
The second reason why Twitter may not work for businesses is a failure to adequately track and monitor content. Many companies have been guilty of posting and forgetting when it comes to Twitter and then complaining that their content doesn't gain much traction. Twitter is a great platform or customer service. Still, by its very nature, Twitter requires the Social Media Manager, or at least a Communities Manager, to be on the ball with replies and to respond helpfully and authentically, Twitter is a fully public platform after all.
Twitter and Personalities
Twitter has also expanded its popularity in the personality arena, much as we see with Instagram. If Instagram is an excellent place for personalities such as celebrities and Youtubers to share visual insights into their day, then Twitter becomes the place where they share thoughts and feelings.
The very nature of microblogging means that many find Twitter a good place to share their innermost thoughts and interact with others across the world. This can be an excellent way to grow your audience and to really show an authenticity that it might have been challenging to show otherwise, but it can also lead to serious problems.
As with every other network we've discussed, it's essential to take into account that if your brand, business, or personality isn't associated with a specific viewpoint (let's take politics as a great example) and doesn't WANT to be associated with a particular viewpoint, then it's best to stay away. One wrong tweet can be shared over and over, and due to Twitter's excellent search facility, one wrong twitter shared 10 years ago may still surface and destroy a business or the reputation of the tweeter.
Social media can, in general, be a fantastic place to connect with thousands of people across the world, it can also be a very toxic pace if it's not handled correctly.
There have, unfortunately, been many celebrities and personalities who have found themselves struggling with mental health issues as a direct consequence of some of the Twitter interactions they've received.
This isn't limited to celebrities and personalities either, there is a growing concern for the mental health of those who work in social media because they have to interact with and sometimes can't avoid seeing some really toxic and nasty stuff online.
This toxic side of social media is something that all of the networks are beginning to take very seriously. Facebook has started adding fact-checking to may links shared online, and they will blur out photos giving the user the option to reveal it if they want to. Twitter is doing a very similar thing, they are beginning to recognise abusive tweets and fake news, adding fact-checking and a hidden option to many undesirable tweets.
It's a start, but many admit that there is a long way to go before we will see a significant change.
What Analytics Can I Track on Twitter?
Twitter analytics has come a long way in the last few years. As more and more social networks move towards a business-first model, the ability to really track your Twitter interactions has become a huge bonus for businesses.
Twitter Post Types
We've discussed in previous blogs the need to track your performance on the social networks that you are on, and Twitter is no different. Although Twitter offers fewer options in terms of post type, it's still worked considering the different options you have and how they will suit your content.
The main post types on Twitter are:
- Text status updates - plain text updates, these can include hashtags and emojis
- Link status updates - Status updates with text and a link, these can be enhanced by ensuring that the website you are sharing from is card-compatible
- Photo posts - you may share up to four images alongside one text update
- Video or media posts - gifs ad video posts alongside text updates, videos on Twitter must be under 120 seconds long
- Retweets - Sharing others' tweets, you can either retweet directly or retweet with a comment of your own.
Text-based status updates are still the most popular tweets to see on Twitter, but for brands, many find that photo and video updates perform much better than their text-only counterparts.
There was a statistic that said a photo-based post will stand out more and is likely to be seen by 50% more people than a text-only post. This has become less true in the last few years, as more and more brands are sharing rich media tweets (photo, video, gifs and photo or video cards) we have found that sometimes text-only tweets actually stand out more because they are different. It's definitely worth doing some experimenting here.
Sharing links on Twitter is a great way to drive clicks through to your landing page, and there are generally two ways people, companies, or brands will do this; either by sharing an image with the link in the copy or by sharing a Twitter card. We'd recommend the use of Twitter cards over link-in-copy tweets. Link-in-copy tweets can be confusing for the user, they may click on the image and get frustrated that they are not taken to the landing page, and many will completely miss the link in the copy.
Using social cards on Twitter is as easy as adding a link to your post, the difficulty comes from whether or not the website is "card compatible". A card compatible website has a couple of lines of HTML code in the <head> section of the site to tell Twitter how to display the link -image size, title, description, etc. It's easy to install and reasonably straightforward. Most websites will do this very well, and many websites using the WordPress platform will use plugins like Yoast to create and modify the social cards on individual pages.
You're able to check whether a website uses social cards by using Twitter's Card Validator. Simply log in with your Twitter account and past the URL into the box, hit validate and you'll see a preview of what this link will look like if you were to tweet it out right now.
Tweet Analytics
If you're looking to get a really good top-level look at your Twitter insights, you'll need to use one of the many dedicated Twitter analytics tools. There are many options to choose from, both paid and free, and we'll discuss some of the best third party options below, but for now let's take a look at Twitter's own proprietary free analytics tool called, rather inventively, Twitter analytics.
Twitter's analytics offering can be a bit of a minefield at first! When you first log into analytics.twitter.com (which is available for free for every account), you'll be presented with your activity so far in the month, a fantastic place to analyse your Twitter account. You'll see how many tweets you've sent out, how many impressions they received (impressions is the number of times your tweet showed up in someone's timeline), how many profile visits you've had, how many mentions you've had, and how many new followers (or not) you've gained in the month so far.
You'll also see a 'Tweet Highlights' section, this is the area that you can grab a snapshot to analyse your tweets and get an excellent overview of how things are going so far. Your Tweets Highlights section shows you your top tweet so far, your top mention, and the top media tweet so far (media tweets relate to photo, video, gif, and twitter card tweets).
Along the top of your Twitter analytics, you'll see a 28-day rolling summary of how your account is doing. This has the same headings as your monthly summary, but it's calculated over the last 28 days regardless of the month. This is a really good section to take note of if you're looking to analyse your Twitter data or analyse your Twitter followers and need a quick snapshot of how you're doing. The graphs presented on this screen are basic, but they are good for just a quick overview. The simple graphs show a rolling average, this can be really useful for seeing a 28 day Twitter follower history for your account in an easy to read format, allowing you to quickie see any falls and peaks over the last 4 weeks.
Tweet Activity
There are two more section s on the Twitter analytics dashboard, Tweets and more. Let's head on overt Tweets and see what options we've got.
The Tweet activity dashboard on Twitter analytics is possibly the most useful of the two main dashboards, especially for a free Twitter analytics tool! Using this dashboard, you can see exactly what results your tweets are getting over practically any period you want to. You are limited to an overview period of 91 days but can see any 91-day period for as far back as your account has been active.
This dashboard has many significant features. From here you can set your own timeframes and get details on your total number of impressions over the set period, your engagement rate, how may link clicks your received, now many retweets you received, your amount of likes, and the replies to your tweets. For each of these metrics, you will also be given an average over the period.
For example, you may get 332 replies over a 91-day period, this would mean you are averaging 4 replies per day.
This dashboard also allows you to see a stream of your tweet activity on Twitter, displaying each tweet individually and showing the total number of impressions, engagements, and the engagement rate for each tweet. If you need more details, under each tweet, there is an option to view your tweet activity.
The Twitter analytics dashboard is a great place to see your own tweet activity, your Twitter reach, your average Twitter engagement rate, and to get feedback on your own Twitter interactions. It's not an excellent place for Twitter follower analytics, though. If you're looking to do some more in-depth Twitter follower analysis, we'd suggest going with one of the options we'll speak about below.
Third-Party Twitter analysis
The Twitter Analytics free dashboard is a high starting point for anyone looking to really up their Twitter game and begin to make the platform work better for them but, like all social networks, it's probably not the best tool on the market for serious social media managers to really dive into the intricacies of tweet analytics.
Luckily, there are many excellent options for Twitter analysis tools on the market, and many are either free, freemium, or very well priced. We'd suggest shopping around and trying a few out before you settle on the Twitter tracker that's right for you, it may even come to pass that you end up using two or more to compare the data. Many below offer a free trial period, so it's worth giving more than one a go.
Here are our top 8 third-party tools, in no particular order, for tracking your Twitter analytics.
Hootsuite
What it does:
Hootsuite is a scheduling and social listening tool for all of the major social networks. It can handle Instagram, Facebook, and obviously, Twitter.
Hootsuite has been around for a long time, and has earned its place on every top list when it comes to social media tools, but unless you're prepared to pay a hefty sum Hootsuite's analytics offering can leave you feeling a bit empty.
What it's suitable for:
Hootsuite is what is known as a "full-stack" social media and analytics tool that even offers the option for teammates to join the account. With Hootsuite, you can pre-schedule your posts (see our How To Post On Instagram From A PC blog for a list of other great scheduling clients for all of the major social networks), see a metrics overview of your accounts, create a shared library with your team or colleagues, find new and inspiring content to share and set-up social listening options to find out what your fans are saying about you.
There are many other options, and Hootsuite is especially useful for account security, but their analytics options are particularly useful. Since Hootsuite does everything, it may be the most cost-effective to go with this option, but there are cheaper options for pulling and creating reports on the market.
What it costs:
Hootsuite starts at around $19 a month and has many different price tiers on offer. You may find that the reporting side can get costly, though.
Mentionmapp
What it does:
Mentionmapp is unlike any other tool we've used! It's based on the principle of mind-mapping, where a central idea or user is displayed as the centre of a web, allowing you to visually see how your users are related and how this links in with specific topics and hashtags, making it great for visualising and tracking the connections between users and topics of interest.
If you are a virtual learner, then Mentionmapp is probably going to be your favourite Twitter analytics tool on this list!
What it's good for:
Mentionmapp is great for follower analysis. It's not meant to be a full analytics tool for tweets, but it really excels at showing you the connections between users and their topics of interest.
It's easy to get lost down the rabbit hole with Mentionmapp, but that means it's also easy to discover new content that will be of interest both to you and to your users. A win/win if you ask us!
It's not just your users you can see the connection to either because you can follow a line of connections, you can really build up a picture of how your users interact with other users, who they follow, who they interact with, and who that leads onto.
It's a great tool, and we're really impressed with it.
What it costs:
Mentionmapp does have a free offering, but it is quite limited; however, their paid version starts from just $9 per month!
Keyhole
What it does:
Keyhole works across all of the major social network platforms to give you the ability to track your progress through accurate and in-depth monitoring.
Keyhole's real selling point is the ability to track your progress in real-time, this is a feature we really love and think it's a unique selling point as far as other analytics tools go.
What it's good for:
Keyhole is really good for monitoring your brand or business's performance on Twitter and across the other social platforms.
Due to its ability to monitor in real-time, Keyhole is excellent for businesses who want to run and 'live tweet' events, giving you the ability to monitor and moderate messages on the go.
We also really like the market-research aspect to Keyhole, it gave us the ability to find new influencers to work with and to track various hashtags to see how they perform, invaluable during an event!
What it costs:
Keyhole does seem a bit steep at first, it will set you back around $99 per month, but we think for the unique features it offers it could be an excellent option to go with.
Brand24
What it does:
Brand24's main selling point is that it is a dedicated social listening tool and converts those conversations into really rich analytics for you to interpret.
The ability to track campaigns is a really excellent feature that we liked about Brand24.
What it's good for:
Brand24 is excellent for getting a more detailed and robust view of your brand's performance across the Twitter-sphere!
One of the things we found best about Brand24, is the unique ability to track the number of both positive and negative mentions on Twitter, this an excellent feature that really sets it apart from other tools we've used.
Like many other tools, Brand24 also allows you to track your interactions, shares and likes across Twitter (and other networks), as well as monitor brand performance. Another critical standout feature is Brand24's ability to match you with an influencer, we haven't seen many tools offering this so credit where credit is due for this one!
All of this info is laid out in a really user-friendly interface too. This is one of the better-designed tools we've tested.
What it costs:
Brand24 offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required (nice thought, Brand24) and their prices start from around $49 per month, which we think is really rather reasonable for what they're offering.
Sprout Social
What it does:
Sprout Social pops up in both of our other analytics blogs, for both Instagram and as an analytics tool for Facebook. It's a great platform and has been around for a while, which is a bonus here.
Sprout Social is an excellent all-round tool, offering services for reporting (a powerful and likeable feature here), discovery, food monitoring, scheduling, a message inbox, and the ability to create tasks for yourself or your team.
What it's good for:
Sprout Social's non-nonsense approach to Twitter analytics is refreshing. You're not bombarded with hundreds of numbers or graphics in multi-coloured arrays, this is a serious tool for professionals to use.
Sprout Social excels at showing you the information you need to know, such as tweet performance, brand monitoring, conversation tracking and topic discovering.
Their scheduling tool with an integrated calendar is really an added bonus here, as well as their clear and clean-cut reports that can be used straight away to present results, making it perfect for smaller and more time-conscious businesses. Top marks to Sprout social for thinking about the end-user!
What it costs:
The price for Sprout Social, sitting at $99 per month, may put some off, but when you consider that it's a great all-round tool with fantastic reporting, it makes that pill easier to swallow. Oh, and did we mention you can have a 30-day free trial?
Tweet Binder
What it does:
If you're looking for a robust Twitter analytics platform that also works brilliantly for live events, look no further than Tweet Binder.
This fantastic platform is all about the numbers and the value, allowing you to really dive in and get the results you need, and you can even put a $ value on it!
What it's good for:
Tweet Binder is great for companies that want to use Twitter as part of their event marketing plan. You will be able to follow specific hashtags and campaigns as well as accurately monitor and moderate during your event.
Another one of the biggest bonuses for Tweet Binder is their ability to identify influencer accounts. They go quite deep with this one, looking at potential reach and impacts, giving you a breakdown of the type of tweets the influencer sends, and what the economic value of the influence is. This is an excellent influencer tool for brands who are serious about their event and influencer marketing.
What it costs:
Tweet Binder allows you to create a free report as a bit of a trial, this can be a great way to test how it works and an excellent option to present to those in the company who hold the purse strings! Prices for Tweet Binder start at €79 a month.
Followerwonk
What it does:
The quirky tool with the quirky name! Followerwonk is, as the name would suggest, a tool for analysing Twitter followers to see how they're followed by, what they're interested in, and how that related to your brand.
What it's good for:
Followerwonk is an excellent follower analysis tool, it' presents the findings in a creative yet easy to understand way, allowing even the novice social media manager to really dive deep and understand their audience.
You'll be able to find out many things from your audience, such as where they are located and when they're on Twitter, as well as who they are and who they follow. They have a great outreach tool that allows you to search Twitter bios too, making it great for any influencer marketing related campaigns!
What it costs:
Surprisingly, this tool is actually really well priced. Prices start from just $29 per month, but you can analyse one profile completely for free, which will be a perfect way for novice social media managers to show the worth of the tool.
Tweepsmap
What it does:
Tweepsmap is a really deep Twitter community tool which allows you to gain a full understanding of your followers and the community in which they are active. This is a real bonus feature, and we love it.
What it's good for:
If you're a fan of charts and graphs, you'll be a fan of Tweepsmap! They take follower information seriously and love to present it in many different ways. While this can be a bit confusing at first, once you get your head around the charts and graphs on display, you can really see how this tool will be useful to understand your Twitter community and where your brand or account sits within it.
Some of the information on offer includes total followers, growth (or decline), the total number of accounts you follow and how this has changed over a set period, your followers' occupations, gender demographics, language, and much more.
We've been really impressed by how thorough Tweepsmap is, and how much attention to detail is put into the information displayed to monitor your Twitter followers.
As an added bonus, for the premium users, Tweepsmap also offers a scheduling assistant which, while basic, works very well.
What it costs:
The free offering of Tweepsmap is actually really robust, but if you want the full features prices start around $14 per month, which we think is really reasonable for this great product.
More Third-Party Apps
Other great apps you could try your hand at include:
TweetReach
Great for analysing your competition and creating benchmarks to see how well your account is doing in comparison. TweetReach uses information from Twitter's official partner, Union Metrics.
SocialRank
Great for influencers and advocates, this tool is specifically designed to identify valuable followers. This also makes it great for your influencer marketing strategy.
BrandMaxima
A great tool for hashtag monitoring, benchmarking and performance tracking.
Cloohawk
This tool goes deep into your tweets to show you where you can improve.
Twitonomy
A great competitor analysis tool for analysing other accounts (or your own!)
Deciding what to track on Twitter?
Now we've had a chance to look through many of the different pieces of Twitter analytics software on offer, it's worth taking a quick few minutes to do an overview of exactly what to track. Which Twitter measurement will be best for your brand or business.
The best Twitter analytics to report on are not necessarily the ones you would expect at first, and, like all social networks, it comes down to return on investment: has your post achieved the goal which was set out for it?
When looking at your Twitter analytics, it's essential to decide what you want your post to achieve. Do you want to share news about your company? Do you want to send users to a landing page, are you after engagements on a photo or a video, are you asking your audience to share your post with others?
Really understanding your purpose will help you to understand your results, and then, in turn, your results can inform the purpose behind the next batch of content!
We always suggest breaking your content into content categories, we discussed it thoroughly in our Facebook analytics blog, but splitting your content into key content categories will allow you to see how well it's performed.
There can be a hundred and one reasons why content doesn't perform. It can also seem to be a complete fluke when content does perform much better than expected, but if you take some time to go through your tweets to see what performed best, when, and why, you can build up a picture of how well your channel is performing.
Twitter, unlike other networks, really is about the engagement. Instagram and Facebook like to encourage engagement, but they can be used from a brand perspective more as a promotional tool, but Twitter is definitely more of a conversational tool.
Tweets have a short lifespan, sometimes less than an hour, so you may end up posting much more frequently on Twitter than you would Facebook or Instagram, purely to be heard, but don't post too much! There is a delicate balance! There's no right or wrong answer on this one, but an average is around 3-5 per day depending on the industry.
Getting a good content mix on Twitter is really vital, it can be easy to try to fill your feed up with promotional; material in the worry that you might get lost, but we'd always suggest sticking to the 80/20 rule -80% non-promotional content, 20% promotional content.
A great way to engage your audience, and to increase your reach and followers, is to get involved with trending hashtags. This is especially true for TV hashtags! We; 'd suggest being rally authentic on this one, no one likes unrelated hashtags, but if you can get involved, go ahead, it shows your brand as a bit more human and down to earth.
A great example of getting involved with a trending hashtag might be if you run a bakery shop and make cakes, why not share some of your creations during the Great British Bake Off (#GBBO)? This is a great way to get involved, gently promote your business, and show that you're enjoying something that the rest of the country is enjoying too!
But, what metrics should I be tracking?
When deciding what metrics to track specifically, you'll need to decide how and when you'll be tracking. We suggest doing a weekly check-up of your account, a monthly overview, and a quarterly or semi-annual full report. This will give you some really good benchmarking stats to work with and, by doing a weekly check-in, you'll be able to see if there have been any major changes and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
In all analytics apps, you'll see options to retrieve metrics on the following:
- Top tweets – This is usually the tweet or tweets that gained the highest number of impressions form your audience, but you may also class a top tweet as one which gained the best engagement. Engagement and impressions usually correlate, but it's quite common to see your top tweet marked as one of the highest impressions, which may not be exactly what you want to track.
- Top mention - Again, this is usually based on impressions, but this metric is for Tweets that mentioned your @handle and received the most impressions. This may be someone else's tweet and not necessarily your own.
- Top follower - This metric is usually measured monthly, letting you know, out of all the people who followed you in that month, who was your top follower (measured by how many followers they have in return). This is a useful stat if you're looking to build connections with people and businesses, but do keep in mind that some accounts are followed by a large number of people but don't receive many interactions.
- Top media tweet - Again, based on impressions, this is one of your tweets that included a photo or video attached and gained the highest results.
- Top card tweet (if you use card tweets) - We discussed Twitter cards earlier, and if you're using them, you'll see this metric pop up. It is based on impressions, though, so it may not be as useful at first glance as you'd assume it would be.
Once you've decided what to track, it's important to understand what you can do with the information.
Knowing who your top follower is might be really useful for you to begin a conversation with them. Thank them publicly for the follow and build a rapport. This is especially important in industries that are quite close-knit, or for those looking to work with influencers.
If you notice that one of your media tweets did particularly well, why not consider resharing it? We wouldn't suggest sharing exactly the same tweet, although tweets have a short lifespan, so it's not an awful idea, but it may be a good idea to reshare with different copy attached.
At the very least, knowing what your top media tweets are means you can begin to look at the correlations month by month, meaning you will start to see what kind of media does better. Are they photo tweets with beautiful photography? Behind the scenes at your workplace? Do they include people or buildings? Did you design the post in Canva or similar to make it stand out? Are there words on the media? All of these questions are important to know the answer to if you are serious about tracking your results and improving your account.
Other Important Stats to Track On Twitter
There are a myriad of important stats to track, but here are some of the more important ones we like to track on our own account and what they can tell us:
- Engagement Rate – how engaging our tweets are, how many people liked, commented, retweeted, clicked, etc.
- Tweet length – Do long tweets get better engagement than shorter tweets? This is something that is worth tracking
- Time of Day – Which tweets get higher engagement, and when were they posted? Should we be doing more link tweets in the afternoon or the morning? How are Wednesdays at 2pm fixed for engagements? By tracking this stat, we can answer those questions and tailor our content accordingly.
- Video stats – Did our users watch the videos? How long did they watch for? Did they prefer shorter ones or longer ones, landscape or square? This information is invaluable for informing a good content strategy.
- Hashtags – We can track and compare our hashtag usage to see which ones perform better and gain impressions and engagement.
- Reach – This is different to impressions, and we can use our analytics tools to work out the reach percentage of our tweets, using it to inform our content plan further down the road.
Setting Goals For Your Account
When you first log into Twitter analytics or any of the analytics apps we've mentioned above, it can feel a little bit overwhelming, all of this information hitting you and, although it's great to be really well informed, if you're just staring blankly at your screen, that's not helping anyone!
That's why it's important to start thinking about your account goals. What do you want to achieve this week, this month, this quarter, or this year? It's ok to change your goals, and it's ok to have short-term, medium-term, and long term goals for your account too.
Setting goals will allow you to begin to see if your account is doing well for the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you set. Your goals may look something like this:
- Gain 2000 relevant followers in Q1
- Connect with 3 influencers in the industry in May
- Link tweets receive 100 clicks on average
- Maintain an average of 1.6% engagement rate over Q2
Ok, so let's break down those goals and see how we can use analytics to tell if we're achieving them or not.
Goal 1: Gain 2000 relevant followers in the first quarter
If you have a new account, gaining followers and a bit of traction on your tweets is going to be an important first step. There are many ways to do this, such as adverts and reaching out, but you can use your analytics to see how well you're performing. Are you on target to reach your goal? Which of your tweets has resulted in more followers? If you see a spike in followers, what were you doing around that time to cause it to happen?
Goal 2: Connect with 3 influencers in the industry in May
You'd like to connect with three influencers in your industry, great. After all, it's a good idea to open the door to influencers, and you can use your analytics to see how many followers your recent followers have. There are many apps that specifically deal with followers (we mentioned a few above), and these are great for finding out the worthwhile people or accounts to follow and connect with.
Connecting may look different in each industry, and it's important to really make sure you are connecting with the right accounts and that those followers will be useful for you. If you're in pharmaceutical manufacturing, for example, it would be fairly pointless to attempt to connect with Kim Kardashian!
Goal 3: Link tweets receive 100 clicks on average
The wording of a goal like this is important. Analytics can be used, as all statistics can, to present many different sides of the story, and, depending on how you present that story, you may be succeeding, or you may be failing.
Let's look at an example. You have sent out 1000 tweets in the last 3 months (that's a lot, but go with us on this one!), and you received 100 website clicks from those 1000 tweets, which means that on average, you have a 10% click rate across your tweets. That's fairly good, but it seems a bit low, so let's look into it a little deeper.
Of those 1000 tweets, 600 of them included a link, and only 400 were clicks to your website. So now, we can drill down a bit further in our analytics. We can actually discount 600 of our 1000 tweets because they were either not designed to be links to your website or they didn't include any links at all.
Now we're looking at 100 clicks from only 400 tweets, which actually ends up giving you a 25% click rate. Do you see how tracking the right information is so vital? You were about to go into your board meeting to present limp results; now you can present really rather good results!
Goal 4: Maintain an average 1.6% engagement rate over Q2
This is another goal that could go another way, depending on the analytics you decide to track. Every analytics platform should tell you what your current engagement rate is and how it's changed over time.
The formula for working out your engagement rate is quite simple:
Twitter Engagement Rate = (Engagements ÷ Impressions) x 100
Engagements are classed as actions; these could include link clicks, photo clicks, likes, comments, retweets, shares, etc. You will want to divide these by your impressions and times by 100 to get the percentage.
By setting and using goals, you will actually speed up your reporting process by eliminating the information that is either completely useless or just not useful at this moment in time. You'll also know exactly what information you're looking for and what you're tracking rather than just aimlessly staring at the data hoping it will tell you a story!
Remember, statistics and analytics are only the stepping stones for a good social media report. They are the foundations, but the story of your account is what conclusions you can draw, what you can learn from the analytics you are looking at, and how you can implement those changes to improve your account. That's really where the fun begins!
In Summary
By now, we hope you've got a great idea of how and why to monitor your Twitter analytics, and you've got a few new tools to try out for your brand or business.
Twitter is a very unique social network, and this appeals to many people over the likes of Facebook and Instagram. Still, it really is a network where being authentic is vital.
More than once brands have been caught in a 'Twitter storm' and have risked destroying their brand due to the way they have behaved online, but even if you do find yourself in a Twitter storm, keeping it real and replying within the right tone of voice for your brand is absolutely vital.
Yorkshire Tea, a British teabag manufacturer, was under fire at the beginning of 2020, nicknamed 'Yorkshire Tea-gate' when Chancellor Rishi Sunak posted an image of himself with a catering sized bag of Yorkshire Tea, many threatened to leave the tea company because of this promotional stunt, but Yorkshire Tea held their nerve and replied to nearly every comment in a fun and friendly way, gaining themselves thousands of new followers and even starting a movement to buy Yorkshire Tea in 'solidari-tea' with the brand.
This one simple post -that was, by the way, not planned- is an excellent example of why we must understand our audience and their feelings. Yorkshire Tea could have just apologised, but they understood that their audience expected more, and they got it!
We hope that's demystified Twitter analytics for you, and we'd encourage you to check out our other blogs on Facebook analytics and Instagram analytics.
Looking at analytics as the whole picture can be really useful to see how your brand is performing across your digital marketing efforts, it's also a great way to see the different type of content your audience likes and how valuable each platform's audience is to you.