Twitter can be used in several ways: Be it for building or raising awareness of your brand, entertaining your audience or providing customer service. As you can see, the purposes in which you can use Twitter in your digital strategy are manifold, as are the ways of effectively analyzing your Twitter efforts. Therefore, the next step after crafting and scheduling your tweets is to take a look at your current data i.e. your social media footprint. Now it becomes a bit tricky, because you not only have one option that enables you to analyze your social media footprint. No, there are dozens of ways on how to analyze Twitter performance.
How to approach Twitter Analytics:
To make things easier, I’ll briefly outline three methods with which you can evaluate your data.
The first method is the most obvious, but also the most labor intensive approach: Manually gathering your Twitter data from your account and entering your performance data one by one to an Excel sheet.
The next method would be to use the in-house analytics dashboard that is provided by Twitter. Be aware that with this method, you only have limited data access and no benchmarking possibilities.
The third method would be using a social media analytics tool that automatically pulls the data for you, offering more customization possibilities and as well benchmarking.
After you have taken your pick on your analysis tool, it is time to gain an understanding of your data.
Important: Without understanding your data, you won’t be able to select the right KPIs to measure your goals. After that, you’ll know what works for you on Twitter.
Setting up goals is also important as it gives you an essential overview of your social media achievements. To understand how to set up your goals, I’ll take a look at different metrics that will help you to identify your social media goals.
After understanding how you can gather your data in one place, it’s important to look at the metrics and KPIs that help you to analyze and achieve these goals. To illustrate our examples, I’ve chosen a combination of the three aforementioned methods.
The size of your audience is maybe one of the most important indicators for every digital marketers. But why? In simple terms, more followers generally lead to higher impressions and clicks. Two metrics that help you to identify if you have gained more follower over time are the “Followers Total” and as well the “Followers Change” metric.
The “Followers Total” depicts the change in the amount of followers that your brand has gained over a specific time frame. It helps you not only to see the Follower numbers for your brand, but also you gives you the chance to benchmark your number against another brands.
The other metric that I want to look at is the “Follower Change”, this metric gives you are more detailed overview on your follower development. By observing the relative changes in followers you can identify why certain days led to a growth or decrease in your followers.
The next KPI I want to look at is the response time. Having an overview of how quick your support team is really important in the case that you use Twitter for customer service.
With a metric like this, it is possible for you to see how quick your customer support gets back to questions on Twitter.
So when you analyze your Twitter performance, it’s necessary to take take this metric into consideration since it reveals so much about the efficiency of your social media customer service, and also shows you where your weak points are.
By including this metric in your goal achievement you can avoid to have frustrated clients and even turn them into loyal customer of yours.
One way to reach your social media goals is to learn more about the audience you reach on Twitter. Luckily, there is an easy solution to find more about your followers and their interests.
Twitter provides an overview of for your audience interests in the audience insights section of your account and lists the top ten interests by percentage.
A great way to tailor your content on Twitter to the likes of your audience or it can even show you that your content needs to more specific to encourage people to engage with your tweets.
Another important indicator of the success of your Twitter account is to analyze how many people interacted with your tweets. This can be done by looking at your average interactions per tweet.
Through observing the average interactions per tweet, you can develop an understanding of the performance of your tweets. If you prefer to analyze your social media footprint manually, you have the possibility to calculate the average interactions like this:
Take all interactions (Likes + Retweets + Replies) on all the own tweets within your chosen timeframe and divide it by the number of tweets that were posted in the selected interval.
Interactions are public data. That means you can even compare this number with the competitors in your field. In contrast, all the data that is looking at the engagement of your tweets or the impressions are private data. That means only you can see this data in the analytics tool of your choice or in Twitter’s in-house analytics section of your account.
Interested in knowing how many people users saw your tweets? Than you need to look at your impressions data.
Impressions are a good indicator for knowing more about how well your Tweets performed in terms of views. This not only gives you the opportunity to see how many times your tweets popped up on people’s feed, but it also gives you the valuable information on what weekday you have reached an impression peak.
Note: The access of private metric data such as impressions and engagement is not only restricted to Twitter analytics, but it can also be accessed in quintly’s social media analytics software. Full disclosure, accessing private data for Twitter in quintly causes additional costs. Contact our customer support, if you want to learn more about it.
Now it’s time to go back to our Social Media Analytics cycle. We successfully accomplished the first two steps. In our final step, it is time to set up a report for your Twitter performance. For a powerful report, it’s necessary to include the most important KPIs. But before you create an automatic social media report, it’s crucial to define the recipients of your reports.
One report for your marketing team can, for example, look different than the a report to upper management. Your team members that are involved in the creative process need detailed information on post level in order to effectively adjust tactics.
Whereas a basic report with the most important social media KPIs is sufficient for upper management. Therefore, choose your KPIs wisely and create a balanced report tailored to the department you are reporting to.
One more thing: include your competitors in your report. Through this, your analysis becomes even more powerful and tangible for the recipients.
Another last helpful feature that a social media analytics tool provide is that you are easily able to save a lot of time through automating reports or enabling you to export your report in different formats. This is a key factor to make your data available accessible for everyone.
With these three step approach to analyzing your Twitter efforts, it will be possible for you to achieve long-term success for your own Twitter channel. But keep in mind that it is necessary to constantly adjust and adapt your goals. That said, with this framework you already have done a lot of groundwork that will help you to achieve your goals.
How do you analyze your Twitter performance? Did I leave out something that is important to you? Looking forward to hearing from you. Simply share your thoughts with us in the comments section.
Related articles:
Use Case: How AirBnB utilizes Twitter for their customer support
Twitter Study: Steep drop in interactions for biggest profiles
5 Don'ts of Twitter Following
5 Common Questions about Twitter Analytics answered
Twitter Hashtag Analysis: Do People Really Use Them?
Our Twitter Mentions Overlap feature - Find out who is talking about you