Though I am using and teaching Social Media for years, but I must admit that I was not a big fan of analytics. But trust me that was due to my immaturity. For quite some time I started understanding that it’s absolutely essential to analyze the performance of our online content to make it more effective and get best ROI. Though I made it a habit to start checking Google Analytics and Facebook Page Insights, but I ignored Twitter Analytics until now (and that was real foolish step from me as I have 10,000+ followers on Twitter).

When I read the article on new Twitter Analytics by Laura Roeder , I thought I shouldn’t ignore it any longer. I gave it a try.

How to Access the Twitter Analytics

You can go to https://ads.twitter.com/user/username/tweets (replacing username by your twitter username) to visit the page directly.

How Does the Page Look

Valuable Insights I Found After Checking Twitter Analytics

Now let me share the insights I got after checking the page.

1. Number of Impressions My Tweets are Getting:

‘Impressions’ means how many views your tweets are getting. To quote Twitter:

Number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter.

So this section gave me quite a few insights:

1. My tweets got 51,300 views over last 28 days.
2. And that statistics is 9.6% fewer than the previous 28 days period.
3. I could see the ‘impressions’ for each day of the last 28 days by hovering the mouse over the bar chart.
4. My tweets got 866 views so far today.
5. And that is lower than 1800 views/day average for last 28 days period.

2. List of Individual Tweets with Impressions, Engagements and Engagement Rate

This list is quite handy. A quick glance at the list can give you an idea about which tweets are getting more impressions, and which tweets are getting more engagements.

‘Engagements’ is defined by Twitter:

Total number of times an user has interacted with a tweet. This includes all clicks anywhere on the Tweet (including hashtags, links, avatar, username and Twitter expansion), retweets, replies, follows and favorites.

And the list gave me quite a few interesting observations.

Tweets With Right Hashtags Get Better Impressions and Engagements

I noticed that the above tweet of mine performed better than my other tweets. And the reason behind that was the #HootAmb hashtag that is used by an engaged community of Hootsuite ambassadors.

Tweets With Interesting Images Get Better Impressions and Specially Engagements

I am sure you have already heard that visual contents normally perform better. I noticed it from the analytics too. The above Tweet of mine with 4 cute photos of my rabbits generated above average impressions and great engagements.

Power Tip: 

[Tweet “Do you know that you can post 4 photos in a single tweet from Twitter mobile app?”]

3. Detailed Engagement Stats in the Sidebar

Now if you want to dig deeper into individual categories of engagements, the sidebar is the gold mine for you.

3. Detailed Statistics for Individual Tweets

From the list of tweets, click any particular tweets to see the detailed statistics.

Check the top right graph of any Tweet, and you’ll see the same pattern. The impressions die out rapidly within 1st 24 hours.

Power tip: Lifespan of tweet is really short. So you might want to post important tweets more than once within 24 hours. You can change the content of the tweet a bit if you want. I have seen Hootsuite to do this on Twitter.

4. Twitter Followers Analysis

Now this page is very important too. Don’t you think it’s super effective to understand your audience? Many interesting insights I found from this page are:

1. Change in number of followers over time.
2. Most unique interests and top interests of my followers.
3. Age and location demographics. (Most of my followers are from US and majority of my followers are male).
4. Tweeps whom majority of my followers follow.

Bonus Tips: How to Use ‘Top Interests’ information:

Let me give you a powerful strategy to utilize the above information. I am sure you would prefer to serve contents aligned to the top interests of your followers. Though you can add contents manually, but there is a way to serve targeted contents to your followers automatically. I understand how difficult it is to manage time for all Social Media activities.

Hootsuite Suggested Contents

1. Open Hootsuite dashboard.
2. Hover your mouse to the left and open the sidebar.
3. Click ‘Publisher‘ > ‘Suggested (BETA)‘
4. Put top 3 ‘Twitter Top Interests’ in ‘Suggested Topics‘ slot.
5. Select which Social Networks you want these content sent to from Suggested Content is Sent to slot.
6. Then click ‘Review Suggestions‘.
7. Follow this tutorial if you need help with next steps.

5. Twitter Card Analytics

Do you know about Twitter cards? This is another very useful, but least used feature from Twitter. I will not get into the details of setting up Twitter cards. You can read this article from my friend Akhil for the step by step instructions.

To explain in easiest words, setting up Twitter cards turns your Tweets and website links into interactive and visual content.

And you can check lots of valuable metrics from Twitter cards analytics.

While General Twitter analytics section gives you an idea of how your general tweets are performing, but this Twitter Card analytics section gives you clear idea on how your website urls are performing on Twitter.

6. Best Time to Tweet

Twitter analytics doesn’t give you clear idea about the right time to tweet. Thanks to Laura Roeder, got to know about the free tool – Tweriod. Ofcourse you’d want to tweet when majority of your followers are online, isn’t it? Who want to give speeches infront of a vacant auditorium?

Bonus Tip: How to Use the ‘Best Time to Tweet’ Information

Here is another Hootsuite feature that might help you implement the information above.

Set your Hootsuite autoschedule settings around your best time to tweet.

Now whenever you are updating any content or share any webpage, instead of clicking ‘send’ click ‘autoschedule’

Use Hootlet to share contents straight from your current webpage in your browser.

 Share Your Twitter Analytics Tips or Queries

Did I miss mentioning something? Do you have a tip to share? Please leave a comment. If you have a query, let me know. I’d love to help.

Need Help with Your Twitter Strategy?

Are you utilizing Twitter effectively to create a strong online brand and/or get customers/visitors for your business/blog? Can I help? Book a time with me from the contact widget at the bottom right corner and let’s discuss the possibilities of working together.