Back in July, Twitter rolled out an intuitive analytics dashboard, essentially enabling its users to gauge the performance of their every tweet. Found natively on Twitter, and previously only available to advertisers, verified users and Twitter card publishers, the social media giant has since opened up the platform to all account types, and more recently even added analytics access in its mobile app.
It offers easily accessible insights on standard Twitter account metrics – clicks, shares, impressions, retweets – by promoted and organic activity, as one would expect. Beyond just the basic measurables for looking at realtime stats, however, and despite the fact that, at least for a while, this new and intuitive Tweet Dashboard seemed to have slipped past most people’s radar, its analytics offering is a powerful tool if you know how to use it.
In this post, we’ll cover the basics of what Twitter Analytics has to offer, including a breakdown of the metrics accessible and what they mean in terms of audience or follower engagement. Part II of this blog series will look at analyzing the data in greater depth for a more intuitive insight into its reporting potential.
First, Let’s Get You Set Up
Setting up your Tweet activity dashboard is incredibly easy – simply log into analytics.twitter.com with your account’s credentials and navigate to the top left panel to access metrics by Tweets, Followers or Twitter Cards performance.
Twitter Engagements: The Basics
Once inside the portal, you’ll see a breakdown of Tweet activity by Impressions (number of times your Tweet was viewed), Engagements and the Engagement Rate for each tweet and trend for those over time, to optimize. Engagements are measured by interaction and are tracked by the number of retweets, replies, follows, favourites and clicks anywhere on your Tweet (including hashtags, links, avatar, username and Tweet expansion).
How Are Your Tweets Resonating With Your Audience?
Clicking on ‘View Tweet details’ for a specific Tweet offers a granular view of the scale of engagement for that Tweet. How many times was it shared? What type of content receives the highest level of user interaction? How many actual follows were produced as a result?
Using this insight into engagement type and volume is invaluable when fine tuning your social marketing and content strategy, but it’s just skimming the surface of what the platform has to offer.
Stay tuned for part II of this series to learn more about audience segmentation, analyzing trends in overall engagement and more.