Kate Gingold / Monday, March 30, 2015

Reading Your Twitter Stats

The Sprocket Report

Recently a client followed our advice and took a look at his Twitter analytics. Then he gave us a call. “I’m reading the report, but I have no idea what it’s telling me. Up arrows are good, right?” Yes, up arrows are good. But your stats can tell you so much more.

Using the Sprocket Twitter account as a case study, walk through the Analytics with us. Learn what’s available to you and get some ideas on how to use these statistics to build your visibility on Twitter.

To access your Twitter Analytics, go to analytics.twitter.com and sign in to your Twitter account from there. You’ll go straight to a page with a number of menu tabs including Home, Tweets, Followers, Twitter Cards and Tools. Twitter Cards and Tools require a little technological know-how, so we’ll discuss those at another time.

The Home page gives you an overview of the last 28 days with the percentage of change over the previous 28 day period. You’ll see five categories:

1.   How many times you tweeted
2.   The number of impressions of your tweets
3.   How many visits were made to your profile
4.   Whether you were mentioned in other people’s tweets and
5.   How many followers you have

For Sprocket, all the arrows were up (yay!), but we need a closer look. Every morning we tweet a #SmallBiz Tip. Last month, we started tweeting #BusinessTips in the evening as well, so we’ll want to evaluate how well the new time and hashtag is performing. The effort has been minimal as we are re-purposing older content for this campaign, so 12 new followers and a 4.7% increase in impressions is a respectable ROI.

On this page you can also see your Top Tweet, which is the most impressions of something you tweeted, and your Top Mention, which is the most impressions of a tweet in which you were mentioned. Sprocket is frequently mentioned in tweets about web industry news because we are active on Twitter and have established a reputation.

Analytics summaries are available on this Home Page for the past six months, giving you an idea of your past Twitter performance with constant improvement as the goal. If there are dips or spikes, you’ll want to understand what caused them. One way to figure it out is to click on the Tweets tab in the menu.

The top of the Tweets page has a graph with the actual daily impressions of your tweet activity and the average daily impressions. In the upper right corner is a date range selector to see activity each month or for any 90 day period.

Below the chart, all of your tweets are listed along with their Impressions and Engagements. Impressions are the number of times users saw your tweet on Twitter and Engagements are the number of times users interacted with your tweet. Interactions include favoriting, retweeting, replying, going to your profile and so on. By checking which of your tweets were the most popular, you’ll know which ones to emulate going forward.

Each listed Tweet has a View Tweet Details link. If you click on that, you will see the Impressions Overview. For older tweets, you can see the activity in the first twenty-four hours or in the last twenty-four hours. We found this interesting for our new campaign. The morning tweets were being viewed again in the evening, but the evening tweets were not being viewed again the following morning.

Followers is the last page we’ll talk about today. Here you can see the location, gender and interests of your followers. For Sprocket, attracting the right followers is always a challenge. Followers are mainly from Chicago and Los Angeles, which is logical since that mirrors our physical locations. The top interests of our followers are entrepreneurship and marketing, which also makes sense since we talk about website development.

But our followers are 80% male and we want to attract more female followers. Why? Because the majority of those who actually use websites in the office day-to-day are women and they are the ones who either purchase or influence a website purchase. Our male followers are mainly fellow web developers, and while we want to continue swapping industry news with them, we’d also like to use Twitter to market our services.

So we have our work cut out for us. How about you? We trust that spending just a few moments with your Twitter Analytics has given you new insight into how to use this tool for your business. If you still have questions, email or call. Since social media management is one of our services, we’re happy to help.

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Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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