Twitter has had it’s up and downs. Luckily it has survived and is the only true social media platform around today. It’s a great way to get involved in any conversation.
After spending months on product research, design, then finding a developer to build your SaaS product (Software as a Service product). You are now ready to get people using it. However, your Google Analytics stats for the marketing site are a flat line.
Twitter can be used to promote any type of product or service. There isn’t a topic out there that isn’t being discussed on Twitter. You need to provide value and get involved by talking to your potential audience.
Twitter Analytics – Audience Engagement
You have gone and created a Twitter account and made sure your profile looks like a sister page of your website. After posting a few tweets introducing you and your business. As well as a five or six tweets sharing blogs posts and content. How do you start looking into performance?
Twitter is all about trends, conversations and generally the here and now. Although there are still people engaging with older content.
The platform was and is all about the hashtag. It’s explore and search functionality is one of the best out there and centred around hashtagging.
Twitter’s strength, is also it’s weakness. You can pretty much join in any conversation relating to a topic. Because of this you need to be posting and engaging with people a hell of a lot more than any other platform. Oh, and all this with a limited number of characters.
Once you have started building up a Twitter following and have found your niche and relevant hashtags. You need to keep the momentum going and can’t afford to spend too much time looking into how people have interacted with each post.
This is where Elementary Analytics comes in. You need to keep and eye on Twitter Analytics. Helping you see how your posts and interactions are increasing your followers. In turn driving traffic to your website.
Top 5 Twitter Analytics To Track
You have spent a lot of time searching on Twitter. Researching which hashtags and niches to target.
With a brief social media marketing plan you begin creating content, starting conversations and trying to provide value to others.
“How do I know if my marketing plan is working?”
I was involved in an app based start-up a good few years ago. Twitter was something we didn’t really get to grips with when building up a following. We were posting regular content and tested what hashtag worked best for us.
Here are the 5 metrics I looked when reviewing Twitter Analytics. As long as the numbers where going in an upwards direction. For the first few months at least, I was happy.
Tweets
Erm, why even bother tracking the number of tweets I here you ask? Well, because of the sheer volume of tweets posted on Twitter you need to make sure you are keeping up.
I know this sounds daunting. Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast. “You can only manage what you measure”. So tracking the number of tweets you have posted over a 7 day period will give you a sense of whether you are sharing or interacting enough.
Using the number of tweets you are posting, combined with the other stats we will discuss. Will help you see if you hashtagging strategy and content is helping you build up an audience.
It could be you are tweeting 47 times a day. If no one is engaging with you, then something isn’t quite right. You may need to review your plan.
Following
I’m not promoting this way of building up your audience by the way. A tactic some people use is to start following other Twitter profiles that relate to their business or audience they are targeting.
This tactic may work because people seeing that you have followed them. They check out your profile. Like what they see and follow you back.
Unfortunately you have to follow loads of accounts to get a small return on your investment. Twitter also tries to prevent people from doing this.
If you want to go down this route then you need to track how many people you are following. You don’t want Twitter disabling or deleting your account because you are abusing a feature.
On the flip side, if you aren’t using this method of building an audience. Twitter “rewards” accounts that are following a small number of profiles but have a large number of followers.
When following people. Only pick profiles that are important to your business. Or that you find interesting or relevant to the content you would like to put out.
If you are doing well and gaining lots of followers. Twitter likes this and will prevent them from disabling your profile.
Followers
I have just touched on why tracking your followers is important. Using this metric along with the number of tweets you are sharing is a brilliant way to analysing whether your marketing plan is working.
If the number of followers for your account is going up then people are finding your content relevant and are willing to engage with you in the future.
Therefore, followers is a great metric to track. If someone follows your account it means they want to hear from you again. This is something Seth Godin calls Permission Marketing.
This doesn’t mean you need to constantly sell to them. A 80/20 split of 80% content that brings value and engages in the conversation. Combined with 20% of content promoting your business. Is a great way to plan your core Twitter content in a given week.
Twitter followers are deemed in some quarters as a ‘vanity’ metric. I fully understand how people view this stat.
As you have just read, I don’t fully agree with this. It all depends on how your Twitter account integrates into your overall marketing/business plan.
Listed
The Listed metric is when a user has added one of your tweets to a list they have created in their account.
In my view this is a gold gumball. Whatever was in that tweet, that person was very engaged and wanted to be able to quickly view the tweet again at a later date. Congrats, you may be onto something.
Let’s say you have stuck to your marketing plan. This weeks posts have been around a particular topic and you have done a range of “How To” tweets and content.
After reviewing the last 7 days worth of stats. You see you have had 10 new tweets that have been marked as ‘Listed’. Amazing!
You should now drill down and find the actual tweets were listed. Review the content and maybe tweak your plans moving forward.
Favourites
When you click the little heart on a tweet, this is listed as a ‘Favourite’. Or more commonly known as a like.
This metric shows how many tweets you have liked, say over the past 7 days.
You can use you the favourites stat in a similar way to the Following count. Either as a tactic to increase your followers.
Or, as a way to see if you are liking content that is relevant to your profile and business.
Viewing Your Top 5 Twitter Analytics Metrics
To review all this information in Twitter can be a nightmare. Pulling all this information from Twitter is also a pain. Even more so, if, like me you have a 5 Twitter accounts on the go. To see what the growth is like in the early stages of promotion is a massive headache.
This was one of the reasons I started building Elementary Analytics. I wanted a cut down and have a very specific view of my Twitter stats.
At the time I was reviewing Twitter profile metrics for a football based forum and grounds guide for fans.
“Elementary” Or Simplified View Of Your Twitter account Analytics
With our dashboard you can view your top 5 metrics on a single widget. Creating as many widgets as you need for the Twitter accounts you would like to review.
Below is a screenshot of the last 7 days stats for the Elementary Analytics Twitter account
The widget gives a total for 4 metrics over the past seven days. These metrics are tweets, followers, listed and favourites.
There is also an indicator highlighting if a specific metric has increased or decreased compared to the previous seven days.
A graph breaks down the 5 key metrics by day. There is also a slightly more detailed view if you click the ‘View more detail’ link within the widget.
The graph displayed is the same as the previous widget. However, our dashboard gives a breakdown for not only the last seven days. But stats for this month and last month. As well as any KPI’s that has been set.
So you can easily see how your Twitter account is growing in the early days.
As you can see we haven’t tweeted much, only 4 tweets in the past 7 days. Our post planning seems to be working as we gained 4 new followers over the 7 days. What a result.
There you have it. Elementary Analytics’ guide to the Top 5 Twitter Analytics to track when you are starting out marketing your business using a Twitter account.
I would love to hear your thoughts on which metrics to track and if you found this post useful.
Regards, Phil.
We are always looking for people to use our service so we can gain feedback about how we can improve. If you would like to work closely with us to make our service the best it can be. Please drop me an email at mailto: [email protected]. I would love to work with you. We can offer extended trial period to people who can offer excellent insights to help us continually improve.
Thanks for reading.
