Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Analytics

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a guide to Facebook analytics to head off my social media analytics series. This week we’re going to get into Twitter analytics and everything you need to know to make sure that your Twitter strategy is working for you.

We all like to take a look at our stats every now and then, but that means nothing if you don’t know what to do with this breadth of information that your stats are providing you. If you never interpret your analytics the right way, you’ll continue doing what you’ve been doing on social the entire time, regardless of whether that actually resonates with your audience.

To access your Twitter analytics, head over to analytics.twitter.com. You’ll be brought to a dashboard that looks like this:

Home

– 28 Day Summary: This gives you a brief overview of how your tweets have been performing and if others have been engaging with you. It compares the last 28 days to the 28-day period before that so that you can see if your account is consistently growing or faltering.
– Tweet Highlights: This is a fun little section that shows you your top tweet, mention, follower, media tweet, and card tweet for the current month. You can scroll down to see the previous months as well.

Tweet Activity

Click over to the next tab in the top navigational bar in order to see all information you could possibly want to see about your tweets.

– Your Tweets: In this graph, you get a bar chart of your tweets and impressions. (Tweets are in the bottom section in gray and impressions are in the top section in blue. Notice how on the days when there are the most tweets, there also tend to be the most impressions.)
– Tweets: This gives you a list of your tweets during the selected time period (above: last 28 days) with the number of impressions and engagements that each tweet got along with its engagement rate (engagements/impressions).
– Top Tweets: Your tweets during the selected time period in order of how well they performed (based on impressions).
– Tweets and Replies: This section includes all of your tweets, even direct mentions. I would check out Tweets (which tend to be included in your strategy–replies are typically only for engagement) rather than this tab.
– Promoted: This section includes your promoted tweets and how well they performed.
– Engagements: This section shows your average engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies, as well as how many you get each day. I also enjoy this section because each chart is so brightly colored.

Your most important stat in this tab is going to be Engagement Rate. This number tells you how many people interacted with your post out of all of the people who saw it, giving you an idea of which tweets (i.e., Card tweets, tweets with images, tweets with links, etc.) resonate the most with your followers. By identifying which posts your followers like most, you’ll know what to post more of.

Followers

This tab is awesome because it gives you all of the information about your followers that you could ever want to know. Determining your target market is incredible important when you’re creating your social media strategy, and although you should have an idea of who you’re marketing to already, this is a great way to make sure you’re marketing to the people who are already following you. (Or, if the people who are following you aren’t even close to your target market, maybe that’s a sign that you need to make a change in your social strategy.)

Another amazing thing about this tab is that you can create an audience comparison (by clicking +Add comparison audience under Your followers at the top) to see how your followers compare to other groups of followers in your niche. For example, if you run a career blog for millennials, then you can create an audience comparison to “Millennials” to see how your stats stack up. This is also great for finding your target market.

– Overview: This section gives you a general overview of your audience: gender, interests, occupation, income, net worth, marital status, buying styles, education, home ownership, and wireless carrier. Seriously, it’s crazy how much Twitter knows about it.
– Demographic: This includes a good bit of what you can also find on the Overview tab, but with a few more location demographics.
– Lifestyle: More lifestyle information, including political party and favorite TV genre.
– Consumer Behavior: This section is a good one to pay attention to if you sell physical products because you’ll be able to see what kind of things your audience is most likely to buy and how they will buy it. (Going to admit, I’m slightly concerned about how Twitter knows everyone’s type of credit card…or the fact that 60% of my audience buys cheese.)
– Mobile Footprint: This section tells you your audiences’ wireless carrier and type of mobile device they most frequently use to access Twitter. I’m also concerned that the largest percentage of my audience is using AT&T. Their service is awful, seriously, get your asses to Verizon.

Twitter Cards

First things first, if you don’t have Twitter Cards enabled, you need to do so ASAP. Read a little bit more into what exactly they are and what they can do for you in this awesome post from Buffer. (This post is ten billion times better than anything I could put into this blog post, so I’m just directing you over there.)

Baaaasically, Twitter Cards are like tweet extras. When you tweet out a link, the headline, image, and excerpt can also show up in your tweet when it’s expanded. There are also product cards, image cards, app cards, and even lead generation cards.

This section of your Twitter analytics tells you how your card tweets are performing. If you have the WordPress Plugin Yoast SEO installed, you can easily turn on summary cards by going to SEO > Social > Twitter and checking the box to turn on card meta data. You can then choose if you want to enable summary cards or summary cards with large images.

– Snapshot: This gives you a quick overview of how your Twitter Cards performed (i.e., how many clicks/retweets, etc. they got)
– Change Over Time: This allows you to see how your Twitter Cards affected your clicks and impressions during a certain time period.
– Card Types: This tells you how well your enabled card types performed compared to other types. You’ll only have the card types you can actually use enabled. (For example, if you don’t sell physical items, you’ll have no need to ever have the product card enabled.)
– Links: This tells you which links in your Twitter Cards got the most clicks/retweets.
– Influencers: I love this section. It tells you which influencers on Twitter share links to your content. Make sure that you go through this section and follow/thank everyone.
– Tweets: This tells you which tweets with Twitter Cards got the most clicks/retweets.
– Sources: This tells you which apps/platforms were most often used to tweet out your content.

Twitter’s stats are incredible and very comprehensive and not to be ignored. Be sure that you’re looking through your stats every so often to check which tweets perform better than others and what you should be including more of in your Twitter strategy.

P.S. How to Gain More Twitter Followers