Building An Online Brand? How To Use Twitter Analytics To Grow
If you’re building a brand, selling a product or trying to raise awareness of a cause on Twitter, then you should really utilise the free analytics provided by Twitter.
Not only will this data support evidence as part of your communication strategy, but provide you with insight in how impactful your tweets are at reaching your audience, and making changes based on these metrics to improve your reach.
In my role as engagement lead I am responsible for measuring the success of our teams reach on social media, and Twitter analytics provides the metrics to prove intended outputs are being achieved, and influence decision making.
In this post, I will introduce how to use Twitter analytics for your online brand, and show you a few ways of calculating this data into meaningful performance metrics.
First let’s have a look to understand what Twitter analytics are and how to access this information.
What are Twitter analytics?
Twitter analytics are a tool provided by Twitter that gives a range of information about your account’s performance, and impact your content is having.
The analytics provides various information such as:
· who is your latest top follower,
· how much your tweets are getting seen,
· the ratio percentage your content receives engagement,
· how often you’re being mentioned — getting tagged in tweets.
Twitter has fantastic free analytical features, which is fantastic news for organisations on a tight budget, or the beginner looking to get into utilising social media metrics.
How to Access your Twitter analytics data
There are two approaches to gathering this data.
You can get metrics on a Tweet by selecting the bar chart on the left hand side of your tweet:
This approach gives you some quick down and dirty data — useful if you’re wanting to see a snapshot of a Tweet’s performance.
If you want to conduct further in-depth analysis, Twitter offers a generous suite of tools containing comprehensive data such as:
· Dashboard view of monthly performance,
· .csv file of analytics for a Twitter account by the day over a specified period of time,
· .csv file of analytics for a Twitter account by Tweet over a specified period of time.
To access go to:
Click More > Creator Studio > Analytics
The .csv files offers a wealth of information, which you can manipulate for your social media reports.
Twitter analytic measurements — the basics
Now you know how to access this what do all these measures mean?
And how can we turn this into something useful?
Let’s have a look…
Follow count
This is often the first metric everyone sees and wants for an account.
Some big accounts buy ‘bot’ followers to look like they have impressive numbers, and this makes a good case about quality over the quantity of your followers.
However, a high follow count with real genuine people matters because it presents an opportunity to get more eyeballs on your ideas.
This increases the probability of engagement, resulting in more people seeing your tweets are your existing followers share it through their own networks by retweeting and commenting.
Yes — follow count is irrelevant if no one cares for your content, but you can’t deny it’s an indicator for growth, and an opportunity to engage a new reach of audience interested in what you’re saying.
Utilise twitter analytics to measure your followers growth a month to month/year to year basis and/or as a measure of an increase of your follower count over a set period of time.
Impressions
Impressions on Twitter are how often your tweet are getting seen on someone’s timeline.
If you get a lot of people retweeting (or one influential person retweeting), this means you’ll get more impressions on your content.
The challenge with impressions is to turn this into engagement so people aren’t just scrolling past to the next thing.
Twitter analytics will work out your percentage engagement rate (Number of Engagements divided by Number of Impressions).
What is a good engagement rate? Adobe consider 0.5% a good number, with anything over 1% saying you’re doing great — though various sources have different opinions on this percentage.
Twitter has provided an analytics dashboard for a 28 day comparison by default:
If you’re wanting to work out other engagement rates for longer periods of time (say over a year), you can put these monthly percentages in a spreadsheet and work out the average.
Profile visits
Profile visits are an underappreciated stat.
If a tweet is showing a high number of profile visits then this suggests that people have found what you’ve said so engaging, that they’re clicking on your profile to find out more about who you are and what you offer.
Therefore, if you’re struggling to grow your follow count, this figure can reveal which tweets are performing to make people want to learn more about who you are (and which ones aren’t).
You can also calculate how effective your profile is to convert people visiting your profile to followers.
If you work out how many new followers you gain over a period of time, then divide by the number of profile visits, you can work out that percentage conversion rate.
% success conversion to followers over time = Followers / Number of Profile visits
Mentions
Twitter mentions can help you understand the sentiments and opinions of people towards your brand.
If you find you’re being tagged as a mention in people’s tweets you can assume:
1) You’re seen as an influencer in what they are discussing, and they want to get your attention.
2) You’re seen as someone who is an expert in the subject matter, and want to get your views.
Measuring mentions overtime is a good way of evaluating how successful your growth is on social media.
The more you get mentioned the more you and your brand are emerging as an influencer in your desired Twitter community.
You can see your mentions by looking at the summary in your analytics dashboard and adding a month by month comparison into a spreadsheet.
Engagements — Likes, Retweets and Replies
There are other methods of engagement Likes, Retweets and Replies — all have strengths and weaknesses to gaining insight.
Likes
Are the most passive method of engagement, as they are low commitment and take little effort — in many circles of Twitter users utilise Likes as a way of acknowledging they’ve read a Tweet.
Retweets
Present a massive opportunity to be seen by a wider audience, especially if the person retweeting has a lot of credibility in the niche.
(Note: you can’t get analytics retweeting other people’s content, but if you turn it into a ‘Quote Tweet’ where you retweet with your own comment, this is seen as new content, and you gain analytics on this.)
Replies
Replies are a fantastic way of getting real feedback on your brand or ideas. It takes most time to leave a comment, and the Twitter algorithm in 2023 seems to reward content creators who get more comments.
Any of your tweets that get replies appear on the timelines of the person making the comment.
Other data
When you download Twitter csv data, you get a whole lot of data — more than you’ll ever have a use for.
Some data only appears when you post a certain type of content.
For example:
· Link clicks / URL clicks — when you share a link to an external website.
· Media views / Media engagements — posting images/videos which shows how many people interacted or watched through to the end.
With so much data to choose from, it’s a good idea to understand what you’re trying to achieve,
Such as:
· A campaign where you’re trying to drive up visits to view guidance on a website.
· Evaluating how responsive your followers are to video posts and whether it’s adjusting your strategy/priorities to feature more of this content.
Top tips for using Twitter analytics
Now you’re familiar what this information is for, you can use it to aid the growth of your brand on social media.
Here’s top tips on how to use analytics effectively:
Understand what you’re trying to achieve.
It’s good to have some strategy in place — even if you’re not 100% sure what you’re doing, put some objectives down on paper and change/improve as you go along.
Recognise different styles of tweets have different purposes
Writing your tweet in a certain way can hit your reader in different ways in how they react:
· a feel good platitude triggers more feelings to retweet,
· a question tweet encourages replies,
· some tweets are for your loyal existing followers,
· other tweets are new followers, who you’re working to get up to speed with your brand.
Knowing this will help you appreciate that not all Tweets need to meet a benchmark of 10,000+ impressions.
Find different ways of manipulating the data
I’ve provided a couple of examples of how you can use some of this data.
With the amount of information available this is only a tiny fraction (I’ve not touched on some of the other free tools off Twitter that increase your insights!)
Play about with the data, set different targets dependent on your needs.
Don’t get lost in data
You can turn weeding through Twitter data into a fulltime job.
Recognise what you need to collect, analyse, and create the reports you need — ignore the rest (you can always revisit other data later).
Thank you!
This guidance will help you get started using Twitter analytics to gain the insights you need to grow your brand.
If you want more of this type of content, follow me on Medium so you don’t miss a post.
And find me on Twitter @JamesLaneWrites where I talk more about social media analytics, turning vision into a brand, outcomes into strategy, and audiences into a community.
If you have any questions about Twitter data metrics, please do leave a comment — I will respond.
