Twitter offers businesses a lot of options for how to use it. Like a blank canvas, it certainly has its boundaries, but with a little creativity, it’s an excellent tool for connecting with consumers and customers alike. Big brands use it for:
Customer service (like Airbnb)
Witty banter with other Twitter users (like Guinness)
Brand building
And, since it’s one of the oldest social media networks around, chances are your business has a Twitter account and you’ve tried to grow your followers over the past few years. Now what?
Well, you can continue to grow, plus optimize your content so you’re increasing awareness of your brand and attracting more traffic to your website/e-commerce store/blog.
Check out this quick look at how to read your Twitter analytics.
Step 1: Find Your Analytics
How to find your Twitter analytics for your business account
These instructions apply to the desktop version of Twitter.
After you sign into Twitter, at the upper right corner of the screen, click your icon. You’ll see a drop-down menu.
Select Analytics.This takes you to your Twitter Account Analytics Home tab.
Check it out for an overview of how your Twitter account is helping your business in terms of awareness generation.
From here you can get an idea if you’re improving in key metrics like impressions and profile visits. This is a good bird’s eye (😉) view of how your Twitter account is performing on a month-to-month basis.
The first tab: Tweets
On the Tweets tab, you can see more details about how your content performed:
Impressions mean the number of times users saw your Tweet on their timeline. This can be impacted by your number of followers, the time of day you posted, and by likes and retweets, which help your Tweet show up in non-followers’ timelines.
Engagements mean the number of times Twitter users interacted with your content, and could be anything from a click on a hashtag to a response or a retweet.
Engagement rate is basic math: engagements ÷ impressions = engagement rate. Twitter engagement rates are usually pretty low, so don’t panic if you see a small number there. Some estimates put the average Twitter engagement rate at .05% and others put it at .07%.
Example of Tweet metrics
Click on the tweets to see what actions made up your engagements.
Example of Tweet engagements
Twitter audience metrics example
The second tab: Audience
The audience tab on Twitter is a lot like the demographics in Google Analytics: it’s a few more labels to put on your followers so you can understand who they are, what motivates them, what they’re interested in and how you can connect with them.Your goal as a marketer, business owner or entrepreneur is to get this audience to match closely to your target demographics for your products or services.Take a look at the Overview tab. A few of the categories you can see include:
Gender
Age
Interests
Consumer buying styles
If this is wildly different than what your target audience is, rethink what type of content you’re posting on Twitter. The more targeted your social media followers are, the easier it will be to help them through your sales funnel.
Step 2: Figure Out What You Want to Know to Improve Your Tweets
Start with Top Tweets. Look here to see if you spot any trends in the type of content you post. Some factors to consider in the trend include:
Hashtags - Look at your top five tweets for the month. Then adjust the dates in the upper right corner to be for the previous month. Does one consistently show up in your top tweets?
Any other accounts tagged - This is also a place to note potential partnerships.
If another account gets high engagement when you post or retweet their content, that's a good sign. Continue to share their content or even use this data to reach out to guest blog post or propose a partnership. You could say something like, "Hey, over the last 6 months the tweets I've tagged you in have gotten more than 10,000 impressions! Are you up for a quick chat about working together?"
Media - Did you include a photo? Video? Gif?
Length - Is shorter better? Longer?
On a long enough timeline, you will spot some trends. Just keep an eye out for patterns.
Step 3: Take a Deep Dive into Your Audience Demographics
As mentioned before, in an ideal world, these should resemble your business' target demographics. Because if you're using Twitter for awareness and lead generation (you probably are), then you want your followers to be in your target audience.
Quality over quantity, people.
If it's not, don't worry. You can create a social media strategy so you're strategically building Twitter followers as part of your marketing and sales efforts.
On the Audience demographics tab, you’ll first see the “Overview” section. To get started on your audience demographic deep drive, work your way right and you’ll notice each tab has even more information on your audience:
Demographics shows you the country and region your followers live in, plus their home value
Lifestyle shows additional information like political party affiliation
Consumer behavior outlines a few more details about buying behaviors, such as specific consumer goods bought
Twitter audience consumer deep dive
And, if you want to see what the overall demographics of Twitter currently are, you can go to the upper left corner and change “Your followers” to “All Twitter Followers.”From there, you can filter even further by generation, income, gender, interests and more.
Twitter audience filter
Step 4: See What Happened in the Entire Twitterverse with Events
Events show you what Twitter users are talking about and when.
You can use Twitter Events to plan your business profile’s content.
You can use this feature to plan ahead or reflect on how you could have been part of an event or conversation. Planning makes you a better marketer, so if you see a special day, event or holiday is being discussed at large, you should either jump right in and be a part of it or write it down in your content calendar for next year.
Step 5: Track Your Twitter Progress in a Custom Template
Using Twitter for your business depends on your goals. There are plenty of social media monitoring and tracking software available. Think like Sprout Social or Sprinklr.
But if you’re not trying to invest in a monthly or annual software fee, you can easily track everything you need to in Excel or Google Sheets.
Here's a dashboard template where you can store all your digital marketing data. Just update it to include the Twitter metrics that are most valuable to your business strategy.
Data dashboard digital marketing example