The Straightforward

Guide to
Twitter Analytics
Author

Larry Kim
CEO at MobileMonkey
Introduction
When it launched in 2014, Twitter Analytics marked a solid (if long overdue) move toward
greater transparency and measurement abilities for all its users.

Since then, Twitter has continued to make upgrades to the tool, having created a stand-
alone analytics app called Engage in 2016 and launching analytics for Twitter Moments.

Though users now have more insight into their Twitter account metrics, you might not be
using this data to its full potential.

Perhaps you’ve poked around the Twitter Analytics homepage and figured out you can
track impressions and metrics by promoted or organic activity ... and that’s about it. The
good news is there’s much more you can discover in your Tweet activity dashboard -- you
just need to know where to look.

Beyond the basic metrics, here are some incredibly important things you can discover
about your Twitter account and audience using Tweet Analytics. Then, take a look at some
of the free third-party analytics tools that give you a deeper dive into the Twitter
performance metrics you want more information on.

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 How to Access Twitter Analytics

You can access

Twitter Analytics
by tapping your
profile and
selecting
“Analytics” from
the dropdown
menu.

4
Table of Contents

1 - Twitter 4 - Track Twitter

Engegement Rate Followers

2 - What are 5 - Twitter Ads

Twitter (Worth the
Impressions? Money?)

3 - Tweet Activity 6 - Free Twitter

Analytics Tools

7 - Exporting Data
Twitter Engagement Rate

Twitter engagement refers to the retweets, follows, replies, favorites, and click-throughs
your tweets get -- including the hashtags and links those tweets include. Your Twitter
Engagement Rate is equal to your tweets’ engagement divided by the number of
impressions those tweets have made.

Understanding which types of content and topics your audience members most enjoy can
help drive your social marketing and content strategy. What’s the point in sharing content
no one cares about or enjoys?

On the “Tweets” tab, you can see Impressions, Engagements, and Engagement Rate
(Engagements divided by Impressions) for each tweet -- both for paid and organic posts.
As stated above, Engagement includes all activity on the tweet: retweets, follows, replies,
favorites, and all clicks from within the tweet.

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In the example in the page above, we see a tweet from HubSpot received an engagement
rate of 0.8% -- or 47 engagements divided by 5,836 impressions. We found that to be
particularly high: According to 2018 industry benchmarks by Rival IQ, the median Twitter
engagement rate across every industry is .046%. Use this as a point of comparison when
managing your own Twitter Analytics to determine how your tweets are performing.

For a more granular view of the volume of each type of engagement, you can click on the
specific tweet:

Understanding which content items get the most engagement on Twitter is huge. If you
can even commit 10 minutes a week to recording your top five or 10 tweets by
engagement so you can start seeing trends over time -- and then applying those insights
to future tweets -- you’ll be able to better connect with your audience.

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What are Twitter Impressions?
Twitter Impressions are the number of times a tweet appears on a user’s timeline. A tweet’s
impressions are not limited to users who follow you, but this number also doesn’t
filter based on who has interacted with the tweet. Impressions are not to be confused
with reach.

In the previous section, I mentioned that a tweet’s engagement rate is equal to its total
likes, replies, clicks, follows, and retweets divided by impressions. Your Twitter Analytics
dashboard lists each tweet’s total impressions, but what are impressions, exactly?

As stated above, a new impression is counted on a tweet every time that tweet shows up
on a user’s Twitter feed (also known as their “timeline”). So, if 30 of your followers logged
on Twitter and saw your tweet, that tweet has made 30 impressions.

The impressions metric doesn’t consider how, or if, those users interacted with your tweet.
Therefore, impressions alone should not be a key performance indicator (KPI) for your
social media activity. But, because they are divided into the number of engagements your
tweets have gotten, impressions are still an important number to know when examining
your Twitter Analytics.

Impressions vs. Reach

“Reach” is a term you might hear when analyzing your Facebook Page’s performance. Well,
you can also measure reach on Twitter, and it has an interesting relationship with
impressions.

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While Twitter impressions tell you how many times a tweet has actually appeared on
someone’s timeline, “reach” tells you how many people, in total, have the potential to see
it. This includes those users who don’t follow you but follow someone who follows you.
Reach is typically a higher number than impressions. Here are two examples:

If you have 300 followers, but only 190 of them saw your tweet, your impressions will be
at 190 while your reach sits at 300. Why? Although you made 190 actual impressions on
your followers, your tweets have have the potential to reach as many people as follow you
-- in this case, 300.

Here’s a tougher one -- let’s say you have 300 followers, 190 of them saw your tweet, one
of those people retweeted you to 50 of their own followers, and 10 of those followers saw
the retweet. Drumroll please ... Your impressions will be at 200 while your reach sits at
350. Why? You got 190 impressions from the original tweet, as well as 10 more
people who don’t follow you but saw your follower’s retweet (190 + 10 = 200). However,
your tweet had the potential to reach your own 300 followers as well as the 50 people who
follow the user who retweeted you (300 + 50 = 350).

Based on the examples above, you can probably tell that reach indicates potential,
whereas impressions indicate actual performance. Does that mean a tweet’s reach is less
important than impressions? Not necessarily. Sure, you might not see your reach displayed
on your Twitter Analytics dashboard, but knowing how much exposure your Twitter
account is capable of can help you draft accurate goals for the year and adjust your social
media strategy to, well, “reach” them.
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Tweet Activity
Tweet Activity is a section of your Twitter Analytics dashboard that allows you to see various
metrics related to your tweets’ performance in chart form. You can see Tweet Activity for all
of your tweets over a set time period, or for a specific tweet since it was published.

This is a really common question among social media marketers and brands: What made
my tweet take off?

Some tools can analyze your Twitter followers and recommend the best day of the week for
you to tweet. There’s also research out there showing when people are most likely to be
active on Twitter. But of course, the best way to get to know your own audience is from your
own account data.

You can analyze tweet activity two different ways: in groups of tweets during a set date
range, or by specific tweets since their creation. Here’s more information on each method.

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Tweet Activity Based on Date Range

In the Tweets tab of your Twitter Analytics, you can customize the date range you want to
analyze to see when you published your highest-performing tweets:

Then, to the right of the graph shown

above, you’ll see how your engagement
rate, total link clicks, and total retweets
progressed over the that time period.

These three graphs are shown on the right.

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Because these graphs consider daily totals, it’s important to tweet at a consistent
volume every day, or your tweet activity might become misleading. For example, if you
tweet three times a day for the first two weeks of the month, and only twice a day for the
last two weeks, your activity graphs might show a steady decline in impressions and link
clicks because you’ve had less output in the latter half of the month. (This is why
engagement rate is so helpful -- getting a percentage of engagement adjusts
automatically for changes in tweet volume that might occur over the course of a month.)

Twitter used to allow you to view a tweet’s engagement over the course of a day, and I
personally think it was a mistake to remove that feature. I hope they bring it back in an
update soon so users can analyze the best time of day to tweet from their account.

Tweet Activity Based on Specific Tweet

Nonetheless, you can also visualize the activity of just a specific tweet. To access this data,
click the small bar graph icon in the bottom-righthand corner of the tweet you want to
analyze, as shown in the screenshot below.
Clicking this icon will open a window showing you this single tweet’s total impressions,
engagements, likes, link clicks, and more since the tweet was first posted.

This data might just be for one tweet, but don’t underestimate its importance. Examining
these individual results, tweet by tweet, can give you insight into which types of tweets
work and which don’t. For example, if you find tweets that promote videos from your
YouTube account tend to get more impressions than others, you can invest more into
video content as a result.

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Track Twitter Followers

Twitter’s audience data in the “Followers” tab contains a ton of valuable and useful insights.
This is where you can really get to know the people who follow you.

You’ll find answers to questions like: Are your audience members more likely to be male or
female? Which countries and cities are the majority from? What are their top interests? You
can also see who your followers follow as well as your follower’s top five most unique
interests. Answering these questions can help you better identify what content to create
and share on Twitter -- and when to share it.
You can also compare your Twitter followers to different segments (i.e. all Twitter users total):

See If Your Follower Base Is Growing or Shrinking

I’d call myself a Twitter power user now, but it wasn’t always so. For several years, I slowly
grew my following up to about 8,000 followers. In the past few years that I’ve really focused
on my Twitter presence, I’ve picked up another 704,000.

Now, Twitter allows you to track your follower growth. Twitter Analytics shows you how many
followers you had on any given day with the interactive timeline pictured below. Hovering
over various points on the timeline will show you the exact follow count on that day. It dates
back to the day your account was started.

If you’re seeing blips in your follower count over time, it’s important to revisit your activity in
those periods and see if you can learn from it. How often were you posting then -- and what
were you posting about? Were you taking the time to reply to folks, too? Answering questions
like these can help you explain these blips -- and avoid the same mistakes in the future.

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Twitter Ads (Worth the Money?)
I’ve been experimenting recently with paid promotions on Twitter. After reviewing my own data
in Twitter Analytics, I realized my ads weren’t as effective as I thought they would be.

In the Tweets tab, right at the top, there’s a chart that gives an overview of your paid and
organic tweet performance. Like other Twitter Analytics charts, this one is interactive, so
hovering over specific parts will show you more precise numbers, as in the example below. Keep
in mind that the data only goes back 91 days, so take advantage of the ability to export it
regularly. You can make comparisons over longer periods of time in another program.

I’m not spending a ton on paid promotions -- around $100 a day when I use them -- but at a
glance, I can see that compared to organic posts, they’re not having a huge effect. If I were
running specific promotions, I’d be interested in the Conversions information available in
Twitter Analytics. But for getting more impressions on my content, it doesn’t seem worth it
because I could get that exposure for free by just tweeting a few extra times per day.

Obviously, this will vary for every user, but this panel in Twitter Analytics is a pretty simple way to
see what you need to make that decision.

Just below that chart, you can click “Promoted” to see all of your paid promotions in
chronological order. This shows you how many engagements and impressions each one earned,
helping you pinpoint which paid promotions are working (and which ones aren’t).
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Free Twitter Analytics Tools

Still other third-party analytics tools can help you do a deeper dive into content properties
that Twitter Analytics won’t give you as much data on. Want specifics on hashtag
performance? Maybe you want more information on the most influential Twitter handles in
your industry. These are the metrics you’ll need outside help to find.

Below are some of the most widely used Twitter analytics apps and the types of data
they’re best for reporting on. Although most of them have paid plans that afford you
multiple features, each of these tools offer free services that can give your Twitter game a
boost of intelligence.

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TweetReach
User, Keyword, and Hashtag Analytics

TweetReach is a free reporting tool that allows you to see how far your tweets and
hashtags have traveled and who’s engaged with them. You can also get “snapshot” reports
of any user, hashtag, or tweets with certain keywords in them so you can understand what’s
being talked about in your industry in real time.

Klear
Influencer Analytics

Klear focuses specifically on influencer marketing, tracking Twitter’s most influential users
and helping you determine who’s making the most noise and greatest impact on certain
topics of conversation. Compatible with Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, the tool makes it
easy to find, analyze, and manage your relationships with the people you want your brand
to be associated with on social media.
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Keyhole
Hashtag Analytics

Keyhole takes Twitter users on a deep dive into the hashtags and topics they might like
to create entire social media campaigns around. Start by performing free searches for
hashtags, accounts, and topics you want to track. Then, for a paid subscription, use these
insights to set up monitoring programs so you can find out who’s saying what about you,
your event, or your market.

Twitonomy
User, Keyword, and Hashtag Analytics

Twitonomy offers a full portfolio of data about the content you tweet and the users you
follow. Most of this data is completely free, and you have multiple ways to visualize and
report on this information. You can track posts from specific users, get smarter insights
about your own followers, and more by signing into Twitonomy through Twitter directly.

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Tweet Binder
Campaign Analytics

Tweet Binder is a campaign-focused analytics tool that allows you to view activity behind
any hashtag, user, or keyword for free. Under its paid plans, the product gives you both
Twitter and Instagram “walls” where you can see the impact of your own campaigns,
making you a smarter promoter and event marketer over time. Tweet Binder’s free hashtag
report, shown above, gives you an idea of just how easy it is to see the data behind various
Twitter trends.

RiteTag
Hashtag Analytics

RiteTag doesn’t just give you engagement metrics behind a hashtag -- it uses that data to
give you real-time suggestions for which hashtag to use in each tweet you create. The
platform integrates with a variety of marketing tools and social networks, allows you to
create “tag sets” to refer back to, and recommends hashtags based on both text and visual
media you want to post.
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Mentionmapp
User, Mention, and Hashtag Analytics

Mentionmapp is one of few Twitter

analytics tools that presents conversation
data in “map” form. Most of the tool is free
to use under the “Seeker” platform,
showing you not just who’s talking to
whom, but who’s expanding on which
topics and where a topic began. The map
you create stays updated to Twitter trends
as they happen.

Hashtagify
Hashtag Analytics

Hashtagify, as you might’ve guessed from its name alone, is a hashtag analytics tool that
serves up a dashboard of information related to any hashtag you search. The product
works for both Twitter and Instagram, organizing its data into various visual categories so
you can properly decide with hashtags and topics you should get in on. As with each tool
on this list, the free version of Hashtagify offers the dashboard above and a lightweight
version of the full suite of analytics -- which is available through paid plans.

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Exporting Data
How to Discover Even More Trends in Twitter

No matter where you track your social media performance, marketers now have access to
increasingly granular data about their Twitter account. The most useful feature I’ve found in
Twitter Analytics is the ability to export data from the Twitter API as a CSV file.

Even power users with a ton of account activity can fairly quickly export their Analytics data right
from their Twitter account.

To export your data from Twitter, select the timeframe you’d like to use, and click the “Export
Data” button in the top right corner of your Twitter Analytics Dashboard.

You can then sort through your exported data using Excel in ways not possible within the plat-
form itself. For example, I extracted the time of day of my last 2500 tweets and plotted the tweet
engagement rate vs. time of day, as shown here:

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What I found was that the engagement rate (i.e. the # of engagements/impressions) held
steady (on average) regardless of the time of day -- possibly because I have a ton of
international followers. It got me thinking that I really ought to be scheduling my content
for all hours of the day, not just during business hours in my local time zone. Sure, fewer
people will see my updates at 2 a.m. local time, but those who do are just as likely to
engage with the content as those who see it during business hours.

There are so many other columns of data in the CSV export, including the number of
favorites, retweets, link clicks, replies, URL clicks, follows, etc. So you can do this kind of
customized analysis on whatever metrics you care most about.

Ultimately, the best data is your own, so make time to check out Twitter Analytics and see
what you can learn and do with it. Figure out which tweets resonate and why. Then, work
those insights into your social media marketing strategy for a more successful way forward.

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