How to use Twitter Analytics (Working smarter not harder)

So there you are diligently posting away on Twitter and hoping that what you’re tweeting about and when you’re tweeting is actually working in terms of building followers and getting good engagement.

Wait a minute, why are you hoping when you could be checking? Welcome to Twitter Analytics!

If you click onto your profile page you will see another symbol beneath your tweets.

Tucked between the star for favouriting and the dots for more functions is a small bar chart symbol. Click on this and a small box will come up with some useful information.

• How many times your tweet has been viewed
• How many times people have engaged with that tweet
• And what they actually did (retweet,  click on a link, click on a profile picture or name or favourite)

How valuable is that?  Just great  information to tweak the content you send out or the time you are sending it!

And yet there’s more – click on “View details” in the bottom left and you will get this  screen which shows how many times users saw your Tweet on Twitter (impressions) and at what point over the previous 24 hours that actually happened.

It will also show you the number of impressions, retweets, profile clicks, replies and favourites

Of course that’s not all the analytics you 

can get entirely free from Twitter.

From your home or profile page click on your Twitter pic and you will get a drop down menu which includes “Analytics”

Clicking on that gives you a 28 day summary of tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers.  Scroll down the page and you will see great stats for the previous months too.

Including:

• The tweet that earned the most impressions
• The top mention
• The top follower
• The top media tweet (media being your use of photo, gif, card or video)

There are more tabs at the top of that analytics page:  Home (which is where you now are!), Tweets, Followers, Twitter Cards and Tools.

Clicking on Tweets…

…shows you your 28 day activity again,  but this page additionally shows – tweet by tweet –your impressions, engagements and engagement rate.  This page also shows you the average level of engagement that month, the average number of link clicks, of retweets, of favourites and of replies.

Clicking on Followers…

…gives you a line graph representation in terms of numbers since the analytics began (August 2014). And even more exciting than that it shows you:

• Their interests
• Their location by country and city
• Their gender and
• The top account they follow

If you're using Twitter Cards, clicking on that heading will give you a whole host of analytics about their performance and if you click on Tools you will discover how to get started with promoting your own app.

All for free! And of course all of this information is further complemented by any analytics given by schedulers like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or – my own personal favourite – Bufferapp.

Now you know how easy it is to access Twitter's analytics, my best advice to you is to carve out some regular time in your busy schedule to understand how best to improve your tweeting activity

Otherwise you might be wasting a lot of time and effort.

P.S. Of course it does help to have some clear KPI's before you do any analytics.  If you haven't yet sorted those out for your social media activity you might find this post helpful