How to: Business Analytics Tricks You Need to Know For Twitter

How to: Business Analytics Tricks You Need to Know For Twitter

How to: Business Analytics Tricks You Need to Know For Twitter

Recently I’ve been using analytics for Twitter more and thought I’d share some of what I’ve been learning. Here’s a look behind the curtain at some of my favorite stats. These might strike you as a little nerdy, but they’re really quite fun! First, take a look at your overview in Twitter. To check your own analytics, choose home, then click the pull-down menu and choose Analytics.

Twitter Analytics Overview for 28 Days

Twitter Analytics Overview for 28 Days

Twitter Analytics Overview

From your overview, you can see at a glance whether the account is moving up, down, or flat. From my 28-day summary, you can see that Tweets, impressions, followers, and tweets linked to me are all up. Areas for improvement: Profile visits and mentions.

Monthly Twitter Summary

Monthly Summary

Another quick overview is the monthly summary. Above is mine from February of 2016. Tweet impressions are one item I like tracking. Don’t be fooled into thinking that vanity metrics, such as new followers, are important. As Eric Ries says, Vanity Metrics Are Dangerous (yes, it’s from 2009, but still holds true).

Top Ten Interests of a Twitter Audience

Top Ten Interests of a Twitter Audience

Audience Interests

You might be surprised to know what your audience is interested in. My top three are technology, entrepreneurship, and tech news. Of course, your audience is attracted to you by what you tweet. If you tweeted jokes and cartoons all day long, you’d see your followers’ top interest as comedy. The top interests (in particular the top three) can guide the content you provide.

Overall Impressions Show Heaviest Days

Overall Impressions Show Heaviest Days

Overall Impressions

In the above bar graph, you can see day by day and week by week where my biggest impressions are. Because I have a Twitter chat on Tuesdays, those days get the most impressions. (More about measuring a Twitter chat, below, under Tweetreach.)

Impressions Can Tell You What to Share Again

Impressions Can Tell You What to Share Again

Impressions

Here’s something that you can easily replicate. Take a look at the tweet with the highest impressions. Mine had 8 retweets and 8 favorites. There is something about your highest tweet that resonates with your audience. There are several ways to optimize this tweet (in this case a blog post).

  • Wait a few days, weeks, or even a month and share it again.
  • Change the headline and share it.
  • Use a different image and retweet it.
  • Share at different times of the day, still within business hours.
  • Pin it to the top of your Twitter feed.
  • Thank those who shared.
  • Ask for retweets!
Gender and Household Income

Gender and Household Income

Gender and Household Income

If you look at my analytics for gender and household income, you’d see that the majority make $175-250K+.

What does that tell me? Many of my followers could afford my services. I’ve taken over accounts before where the income has been much lower, although the product or service is an expensive one.

Country Analytics Can Help You Decide When to Tweet

Country Analytics Can Help You Decide When to Tweet

Country

You can see from my analytics that most of my followers are in the United States. How does that help, though? It helps with when you time your tweets. I try to time mine between 9-5. If you’d like to know more about whether to schedule, how much to schedule, or how to balance, I talk about that in a previous post, Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance.

Tweriod

Tweriod

Tweriod

For more detailed analytics, try out Tweriod. I know that my tweets early in the morning always get the most engagement. If you look at Tweriod, you can see when your followers are online.

TweepsMap World View

TweepsMap World View

TweepsMap

Another way, besides Twitter’s own analytics, to see where your followers are is through an excellent and fun tool: Tweepsmap. Like the name suggests, you can get a map of your followers. So you can see which countries they’re in, or zero in on a state or city. Above is my worldmap.

State-by-State TweepsMap

State-by-State TweepsMap

Above is a screenshot of my state-by-state Tweepsmap. It’s interesting that Twitter analytics shows that 56% of my followers are U.S.-based and TweepsMap shows that 62% of my followers are in the U.S. At any rate, the majority are in the United States.

How does TweepsMap Help Me?

Suppose you are a purely local brick-and-mortar store. If you had above map, you might decide to focus more on gaining followers locally. Or, if you sell widgets overseas, maybe you don’t have enough followers in a particular country. So you can change your focus to attract more of the followers you’d like. Since the majority of my clients are in the U.S., this map is fine. That is, I wouldn’t change when I tweet.

Measure Your Hashtag or That of Your Twitter Chat with TweetReach

Measure Your Hashtag or That of Your Twitter Chat with TweetReach

TweetReach

With Twitter, there are tools that can assist you in finding out how far a tweet or hashtag reached. For my chat, #DigiBlogChat, I use TweetReach, which gives you a snapshot report to show you potential reach, impressions and Tweet volumes. Login through Twitter.

Other Things to Measure

I like to measure influential followers, especially for local accounts. I track these over the course of a month in a spreadsheet or document. Also: a good one to track is conversations with people interested in your services. Sometimes those conversations take place in direct messages.

What One Thing Would You Measure?

If you could measure one thing, what would it be? Leave me a comment! Thank you.

 

 

Comments

  1. This is useful information. I look at Twitter analytics on Mondays.

    I do Maintenance Mondays to remind myself to clean up my followers, see what my top tweets were (top card tweet helps, too) and the impressions. I also login to ManageWP and do all my WordPress updates on Monday.

    • Hello Bridget!

      I love how you’ve created a structure for your analytics (and even a name–Maintenance Mondays!). Checking in every week is even more helpful in terms of being able to change directions and tweak strategy quickly.

      Awesome!

      Thank you for your support, your creativity, and for sharing your ideas. It is very much appreciated!

      Carol

  2. Hi Carol

    I’m not much of a twitter analytics nerd. So your post was very useful in getting me to “nerd out”, so to speak. I’m amazed at the household income categories of my audience. I wonder if this figure is skewed by the companies that follow me. If this is true I should double my rates!

    I use Buffer and sometimes check out my Buffer analytics. Buffer break down the engagements to number of clicks, likes and retweets. It can also sort your tweets in order of popularity according to each of these metrics. Pretty useful, and I don’t think twitter analytics offer this.

    Clement

    • Hi Clement,

      Yes, isn’t that household income something else? I wonder too, if that category gets skewed by big brands. Where do those numbers come from? That would require some research (and maybe the subject of a future blog post).

      I’d like to try Buffer. Have heard so many great things about it!

      Thanks for stopping by,
      Carol Stephen

  3. This is very useful! Thanks for sharing your insight on Twitter analytics!

  4. Andrew Bowers says

    What is the difference between the Monthly Summary Impressions (under Analytics->Home) and the Impressions per tweet sum for the same month (column E) that comes from the data export feature in Twitter Analytics?

    • Hello Andrew,

      Perhaps if I knew a little more about the context of your question, that would help me answer. Is there something that you wish to achieve from knowing the exact impressions for the month?

      Thank you,
      Carol Stephen

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