Navigating Twitter Analytics: Key Metrics and Why They’re Important

Twitter has become a platform for sharing content and thought leadership. To best understand what content is benefiting your business, you need to dive into your Twitter Analytics. This post will give you an overview of the metrics within the Twitter Analytics platform, which metrics to pay attention to, and how they inform your content strategy.

An overview of Twitter Analytics

To access Twitter Analytics, log into your Twitter account. Click your avatar in the top right corner and choose Analytics from the drop-down menu. A dashboard will show a 28-day summary of how your tweets are performing.

The dashboard provides monthly summaries including impressions, profile visits, mentions, and new followers. It also shows your top tweet, top mention, top follower, and top media tweet. This is the best place to get an overview of your performance and quickly compare month-over-month performance.

Audience insights

Looking at audience insights is a great place to start when developing and refining content strategies. It gives a general overview of who makes up your follower base, their demographics, and their interests.

This information helps identify content your audience cares about, whether you’re catering to their interests, and the trends in your followers. If your audience is mostly male and interested in comedy, create content that speaks to that demographic. You may discover that your audience is made up of different demographics and psychographics than expected, meaning your content strategy may require tweaks.

Content analysis

Navigate to the Tweets section to see a more detailed analysis of your Twitter content.

The Tweets section will give an overview of what content is resonating with your followers. You can view your top tweets along with the impressions and engagements they received as well as the engagement rate. The right-hand side has engagement details including engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, likes, and replies. These metrics can be viewed in the platform by month and week.

Exporting data: What metrics matter? 

To get a deeper understanding of content performance, you’ll want to export your data and do further analysis from there. Navigate to the upper right-hand corner, select the date range to analyze, and click export data.
Once you’ve exported your Tweet data, you can analyze tweet by tweet what content performed best. To identify high-performing themes and tactics, focus on a few key metrics that tell the true story of performance.

• Mentions/replies: These give you a better understanding of the true nature of engagement with your content. Mentions are much more important than surface-level engagements, such as likes.
• URL clicks: Again, URL clicks give you a greater understanding of your engagement. They show what content resonates with your audience enough for them to click and learn more. It can also show you what external content, such as blogs, are performing well.
• Retweets: This is a key metric to track and quantify advocates of your brand. A retweet signifies someone’s willingness to promote your brand’s content.
• Engagement rate: This shows engagement as a rate of the page’s total follower count. It’s a much better representation than only counting likes.

Avoid looking at impressions as an indicator of performance. Twitter moves quickly and is focused on real-time, which makes impressions an inflated vanity metric.

Tracking the proper metrics and KPIs allows you to gain deeper insight into what content is effective, and inform your business’s content strategy and overall social media marketing strategy

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