How to use Twitter Analytics as a small business

There are 14 million people in the UK with a Twitter account. If you’re not one of them and you own a small business, you could be missing a very profitable trick.

Given that the average Twitter user follows five businesses and 77% of people using Twitter say they feel more positive about a brand when their tweets receive a reply – it might be time to incorporate this platform into your social media strategy. If that isn’t convincing enough, 54% of users say they’ve taken action after seeing a brand mentioned on Twitter and companies using the site for customer service see a 19% lift in customer satisfaction.

This article will cover the key things you need to know about using Twitter Analytics, including how to use it and the metrics you should measure.

Twitter Analytics – what is it?

It’s a platform on Twitter that enables you to analyse your tweets, understand your followers and crucially, determine how the content you’re sharing is helping to grow your business.

On your Twitter analytics dashboard you’ll find statistics on:

  • Your top-performing tweets
  • Engagement rates
  • Conversion tracking (what people do after clicking on your ad/post)
  • Number of impressions, profile visits and followers you’ve received within a specified timeframe
  • The biggest influencers in your network
  • How many times users have seen, retweeted, liked and replied to your posts
  • Impressions, results and cost-per-result for any Twitter ad campaigns you’ve carried out

The Quick Promote tool will also enable you to share and promote chosen tweets to targeted audiences.

Why is Twitter Analytics important?

Like any marketing campaign, it’s important to track results. This activity is key to understanding what you’re doing that’s working well, or not so much, and if you’re getting a good return on investment. When armed with data, you’re able to make better and more informed marketing decisions in future campaigns.

As well as providing valuable information about your social media performance, Twitter Analytics offers helpful insights including:

1. Patterns

Do your Tweets perform better on certain days? Do some topics get more likes than others? If you can identify certain times and days your audience is more responsive and the topics they like to hear about, this will give your social media efforts a real boost.

2. Video content performance

Within analytics you’ll be able to view a number of metrics from your video post, including the number of times users viewed your video and the total number of minutes users spent viewing the video. Along with this, you’ll find the completion rate – being the percentage of users that finished the video and the number of clicks on the call to action button.

3. Follower growth

An increase in followers is a good indication of how your content is performing. If you see a sudden rise in numbers, this is positive. On the other hand, if you rarely get new followers, this may be a sign that your content is not particularly engaging.

4. Conversion tracking

Find out exactly what someone does once they’ve clicked on your post. How long did they spend on your website? Did they complete a call-to-action? Did they make a purchase?

5. Tweet analysis

The tweet activity function is vital because it allows you to analyse impressions and engagements. The overall engagement rate is what tells you how your audience is responding to your content. A low engagement rate suggests your content isn’t resonating with your followers. A good engagement rate, however, says that people find your posts interesting, relevant and worthy of a like, retweet or comment. What’s more, the higher your engagement rate, the more likely new audiences are to discover your posts.

Using Twitter Analytics

Learning how to use Twitter Analytics is very straightforward, which is great news for those who aren’t well acquainted with the platform.

To get started, head to the Twitter Analytics page. If you’re on a desktop, you can find this by clicking on the three dots on the left menu and select ‘Analytics’. This will then direct you to your dashboard.

Twitter screenshot

On your dashboard you’ll find useful data from the last 28 days such as impressions, profile visits and followers. If you scroll down, you will also be able to see your top tweet and your overall summary from previous months.

Twitter screenshot - summary

At the top of the dashboard page you’ll see a tab named ‘Tweets’. Clicking on this will take you to a more in-depth analysis of your tweet activity, including engagements and engagement rate. Here, you can also select date ranges, which can be especially useful when comparing post performance over the last month, quarter or even year.

If you run Twitter ads, head over to ‘Conversion tracking’, which you can find under the ‘More’ tab on your dashboard. On here, you’ll be able to:

  • Measure the performance of your ads
  • Track what users do once they click on your ad
  • Tailor messages to certain audiences based on their behaviours and use the data available to optimise your content for conversions

 

What metrics should I measure?

As you know, Twitter Analytics is a very useful tool for measuring the performance of your tweets and ads. However, to ensure you’re truly getting the most out of the platform – which metrics should you be paying the most attention to?

New followers

Growing your social media followers organically can often be a slow process for any small business – whether you own a small bakery in the village of Gorslas or operate an IT support company in the heart of Cardiff City Centre.

Follower growth is an important metric to keep an eye on, because if you’re losing followers it means your strategy needs tweaking. Perhaps you’re posting sporadically, you’re rehashing the same old content, you’re not showcasing the personality of your business or just not engaging with your audience.

On the flip side, maybe you noticed a week or month where your followers suddenly shot up. Take a look back at your posts over this time and review your activity. Whatever the cause, this is what you should be doing more of as it’s a sign your Twitter strategy is working well.

Top tweet

Twitter tells you which tweet earned the most impressions in a given month. As this is the post which reached your largest audience, it’s a great example of what you’re doing right and the type of content you should be posting more of.

There’s a lot you can learn from your top tweets including:

  • The hashtags used. Using hashtags will get your content seen by new audiences.
  • The time of day posted. It’s been reported that 92% of all engagement with tweets happens within one hour of posting so getting your timing right is crucial.
  • It’s safe to assume that your tweets with the most engagement are the ones which resonated with your audience most. Focus on sending out more posts like this and you may also want to consider Quick Promoting these tweets to further extend their reach.

Engagement

Engagement is how many times people have interacted with your tweets. This can be anything from a like to a comment or even a retweet. The higher your engagement rate, the better. If you’re not getting good engagement, you’re talking to a void, but if people are responding, you know they find what you’re saying helpful and interesting.

Tracking your engagement rate over time is key. This will allow you to identify a pattern when it comes to the type of content that motivates your audience to engage with you and what typically tends to fall flat.

Videos

It’s no surprise to hear that video is becoming an increasingly popular medium on social media. Twitter Analytics allows you to track your video activity and will tell you everything from how many views you’ve received and how long people spend watching your videos to what your completion rate is.

The completion rate is the total number of completed views divided by how many people started watching your video. This is an important metric to monitor because it’s a great indication of whether or not people find your content engaging.

For instance, if your completion rate is low, this means that few people are watching until the end of your video. However, if this rate is on the high side, it suggests that users are staying engaged and watching until the end.

Impressions

This tells you how many times users saw your tweet. As part of your content calendar, make a note of the time you send out each post. Aligning this to your impressions will help you to establish the times your audience is online and most likely to engage with your content.

If you’ve noticed that certain posts have received more impressions than you have followers, this is an excellent sign that non-followers are finding you. This is likely to be through a retweet, comments or the hashtags you’ve used. Focus on sending out more of these posts because they’re performing well.

Twitter Ads

If you choose to run adverts on Twitter, it’s essential that you take the time to track their success, as you need to ensure you’re getting a good ROI. You will be able to see how many impressions your ad received, cost per result (CPR), engagements, engagement rate and most importantly, conversions.

These metrics are crucial to determining whether your ad is delivering the desired outcome for your campaign. This may of course vary from campaign to campaign. If you’ve just created a new landing page for a particular product you’re promoting, clicks might be your main goal, in which case you’ll monitor link clicks closely. If you want people to download a white paper from your website however, conversions are likely to be your top priority.

The best thing about Twitter Analytics is that even though there’s a huge amount of helpful information available, it’s still incredibly user-friendly. Even for newcomers. You can also export your data into an Excel file which makes it easy to compare the results of all your campaigns over the space of days, weeks or months.

Original post created by Monique Holtman on the UK Domain.

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