A Puzzling Set of Twitter Analytics
A five-week analysis
Throughout my life, I’ve been a fairly avid user of different social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and, more recently, TikTok.
Although I’ve been using these different social media for years, I have never really delved into Twitter and what it has to offer. I had always been aware of it but I did not see its appeal to a person like me.
However, through this class, I now understand how someone like myself — someone without millions or even thousands of followers — can benefit and interact with my own Twitter community.
I have my personal Instagram account set up to view analytics as I find them extremely useful and interesting. I love seeing which posts gain more traction and thinking about why this may be.
However, in order to do this, you have to set your Instagram account to a professional or business account in order to view these things. As I am new to Twitter, I did not know that all Twitter accounts had access to analytics, let alone had an awesome user interface when viewing them. Far better than Instagram’s analytics user interface, in my opinion.
As far as my analytics for these last few weeks go, I had both results that made sense and results that left me puzzled.
For example, my tweet with the most impressions (243), engagement (47), and engagement rate (19.3%) was a tweet where I took a photo of my DIY reflector with the caption, “Cardboard ➡️ Found, Tinfoil ➡️ Acquired, DIY Reflector ➡️ Created.”
When expanded, I could see that most of the engagement on this post came from people clicking on the image I linked while only a few clicked to expand the tweet. This specific tweet’s engagement puzzled me because the only hashtag I used was #LUComm197 and I was only following people in the class at the time of that tweet as my Twitter account was very new.
This makes me wonder if my tweet was initially clicked on by many of my classmates and therefore Twitter pushed this tweet out to people outside of my immediate Twitter community. If I am correct, that means Twitter has some sort of algorithms like Instagram, Facebook or TikTok that promote tweets and pushes them to other users’ feeds if said tweets gain traction.
Before looking at my Twitter analytics, I would have thought one of my tweets retweeting posts in my streetwear Twitter list would have gotten the most traction. This is because I thought the hashtags used would have gotten my tweets out to more people, rather than just to our own #LUComm197 Twitter community.
Additionally, when I retweeted a tweet from @jakewoolf, he liked it and I thought surely that with his following, it would pick up some traction. To my surprise, it didn’t even come close to my tweet about my DIY reflector.
A final interesting pattern I noticed was that while it might not have had the most interactions, my tweet about my local town boarding up stores during the riots and protests had the second most engagement out of any other tweet. This makes me think that original content — in this case pictures of my town boarding up stores — makes for relatable and interesting content that people actively want to click on and engage with.
