In 2022, Twitter's user count is expected to grow upwards of 329 million. This means that while the potential audience is growing, so is the number of voices to compete with on the platform.
If you want to see social media growth for your business and stand out among your competitors on Twitter, it is essential to keep an eye on your analytics. Here’s where to find them on the platform and what metrics to track.
[Read more: A Quick Guide to Marketing Your Business on Twitter]
Where to find Twitter Analytics
Since 2014, Twitter Analytics has been available to track and view various key metrics. Both personal and business accounts can use this tool to view impressions, followers, history, retweets, engagement rates, shares, and more.
Businesses will find these metrics especially useful, as they demonstrate the success rate of their content, determine the optimal time to post, and track growth in real time. These insights allow businesses to make well-informed decisions using data to strategize their social media plan.
To access Twitter Analytics on your desktop, go to the Twitter homepage and click on the "More" button, signified with a circle icon containing three dots. From there, click "Analytics." When you arrive at the Analytics dashboard, you’ll be taken to a page that displays key metrics in monthly summaries, including profile visits, new followers, and more.
On mobile devices, Twitter Analytics is accessed slightly differently. Using the iOS or Android Twitter app, click on the three vertical lines on any of your own tweets to view metrics, including impressions, engagement, new followers, and link clicks.
Twitter metrics to track
Impressions
On Twitter, a new impression is counted every time your tweets pop up on a user’s timeline. So if 100 people saw your content in their Twitter feed, then you made 100 impressions. These impressions are not limited to your current followers; they are counted every time your content displays on someone’s feed in the form of a tweet, retweet, or quote tweet. This means that with impressions, businesses can measure their content reach, helping them to understand their brand awareness.
Impressions can be tracked in two ways — both at the individual tweet level and at the overall account level. They don’t track whether someone interacted with your tweet in any way, so it’s not a reliable indicator of engagement. However, it’s helpful to see whether the total number of people viewing your content is increasing or decreasing, as this can be used to identify how your content is being received by the public and determine whether you should continue in the same direction or shift your strategy.
Activity dashboard
It can be helpful to see how your tweets have performed over the last month. When you click on the analytics dashboard, you’ll choose the "Tweets" tab at the top.
From there, you’ll see a 28-day breakdown of how your tweets have performed by reviewing your impressions, engagements and engagement rate per day. And you can compare these metrics to previous months to see whether your engagement has increased or dropped.
Engagement
Engagement tracks how many times someone has interacted with one of your tweets in any way. On Twitter, various metrics are used to track engagement, such as when a user likes a tweet, follows your account from it, shares or comments on it, expands its media, or replies to it.
You can see an overview of your engagement on your analytics dashboard. If you want to break it down even further, just click on a specific tweet. From there, you’ll see how many likes, link clicks, retweets, and media engagements that tweet received.
Monitoring your engagement can help you identify what topics and types of content your audience enjoys, and what they feel is lacking. By tracking audience engagement, you can improve your business's community and brand engagement by creating content that is more suited to your audience’s desires. In addition, tracking engagement allows businesses to see where and when their efforts aren’t producing the desired results so they can stop putting resources into content that isn’t proving to be worthwhile.
Successfully using hashtags in your tweets can boost their SEO authority, increasing both visibility and ranking. This means your tweets can reach a wider audience and gain more impressions, increase engagement, and improve brand awareness.
Followers
If you want to use Twitter to build your business, then you need to make sure you’re reaching the right audience. Your analytics dashboard will give you a breakdown of your followers' demographics, behaviors, and interests.
You can see your followers' average age range, where they live, and whether they are primarily male or female, as well as their top interests and their income category.
You can also use your Twitter analytics to track your follower growth over time. New followers are important for businesses to track, as they indicate whether or not their content is relevant, interesting, and engaging enough to an audience. It can be helpful to see how many followers you are gaining or losing during a given month. If you notice a sudden dip in your followers, this may signal that it’s time to adjust your strategy.
Pay attention to your top follower — the Twitter account following you that has the most followers themselves — each month, as their reach could be of benefit to your business. Consider finding a clever way to establish a relationship with them, such as tagging and thanking them for following. Doing so could lead to future business partnerships like a social media promotion or an influencer campaign.
Hashtags
Using hashtags is a vital part of any social media marketing strategy. Hashtags help new users find your Twitter account and ensure that your content shows up in front of the right audience. But how do you know if the hashtags you’re using are effective?
To find examples of relevant hashtags for your business, look at what your competitors are using and determine which of those may be effective for your brand. Avoid using irrelevant hashtags, even if they’re popular, as this could be deemed as spam, which negatively impacts the tweet’s reach and your account.
If you use a social media management tool like Sprout Social, you can track your hashtag performance and see which ones perform the best. By learning which hashtags are useful and which aren’t, you can make better decisions about your content strategy going forward.
Successfully using hashtags in your tweets can boost their SEO authority, increasing both visibility and ranking. This means your tweets can reach a wider audience and gain more impressions, increase engagement, and improve brand awareness.
[Read more: How to Hashtag on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter]
Top tweet
Every month, Twitter will show you your top-performing tweet, or the tweet that brought in the most impressions throughout the month. Displayed on your home page, the top tweet is determined by impressions over 28 days. This information can help to compare your best tweets over the past year and see what they have in common.
Did they all center around a specific topic? Did you use certain hashtags that helped you gain more traction? Determine the pattern in your top-performing tweets, and use it to strategize your social media campaign. Monitoring your best-performing content will help you figure out what resonates with your audience so you can create similar content in the future while boosting engagement and growth.
Top tweets can also be strong competitors to use for Twitter ads since they’ve already shown great success with your target audience and have proved to be informative and relevant.
Video content performance
It’s no secret that video is an important part of any content marketing strategy. For most consumers, video is their favorite type of content to see on social media and 54% of consumers want to see more video content from businesses they follow.
Twitter makes it easy for businesses to monitor their video content performance. You’ll see whether most users are watching your video until completion and how they are engaging with your video content.
[Read more: Top Small Business Experts to Follow on Social Media]
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