Taking a Closer Look at Twitter Analytics

With the recent introduction of both Twitter and Pinterest’s analytics platforms, it’s becoming increasingly clear that everyone, from senior level executives down to solopreneurs, want to see quantitative and qualitative results from the time, money and resources they’re dedicating to social media.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring Twitter’s new analytics platform and it’s proved to be a great tool, to measure both quantitative and qualitative data. Here are some of the ways we’re using Twitter’s analytics to gain insight on how successful our clients are on Twitter:

1) Gauge the performance of your current content: With Twitter’s analytics, your tweets are laid out in front of you so you can take a closer look at what you’re sharing on a daily basis. Are you tweeting about one topic too much? Are you tweeting more than you’re replying or retweeting? Using too many hashtags? Not enough? Seeing all of your tweets in one place allows you to get a closer look at the content you’re sharing and allows you to make changes to the frequency you tweet or what you tweet about.

2) Replies and Retweets – These are most important when measuring you or your brand’s social influence on Twitter. I define social influence as how many people look to you to provide relevant content and information – it’s the measure of how resourceful you are. Retweets are indicative of someone agreeing with your insight, finding your content useful and wanting to share it with their network. Replies are someone who wants to directly engage in conversation regarding those insights. The point is, the higher your replies and retweets, the more influence you have on Twitter, which also expands your reach, your brand awareness and further solidifies your authoritative position within your given industry.

3) Follows and Unfollows – At the top of the Twitter Analytics platform, you’ll see a bar graph with blue and pink bars. Blue bars measure “follows” and pink bars measure “unfollows”. You can easily improve your content strategy by gathering insights from this. Cross reference the day someone unfollowed you with the tweets you sent out that day. Does your content give any clues as to why people may have unfollowed you? Maybe you tweeted too much one day…Or maybe you didn’t tweet at all. What about a day when you had a significant amount of people follow you? Did you use a specific hashtag or share a particularly engaging piece of content? Your follows and unfollows can help you understand where to gear your content so that your audience of followers continue to grow, thereby expanding your potential reach on Twitter.

Measuring social media actions, interactions and engagement tells an important story about your brand’s success on social. The challenge is looking at the data, asking the right questions and whether or not you’ll use it to help you be more successful in your approach to social.