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Twitter Analytics: How it works and what you need to know

Are you interested in learning how well you’re performing on Twitter? How many people are viewing your tweets? How many new followers you’ve gained?

You can find all of this information and more for free, without using any 3rd party tools, by using Twitter Analytics.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH TWITTER ANALYTICS

To get started, go to https://analytics.twitter.com and you’ll be able to sign in to your Twitter Analytics account.

A lot of people don’t even know that this exists – but it’s completely free and available to everyone that has Twitter.

You can use Twitter Analytics to manage both your paid advertising and organic stats.

For the purpose of this article, I’ll be focusing on how to use Twitter Analytics for measuring your organic growth.

YOUR TWITTER ANALYTICS MONTHLY SUMMARY

The first thing I normally check when I log into my Twitter Analytics is the summary. The summary will give you a snapshot view each month of the amount of Tweets you’ve sent out, your Tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and new followers.

Here is a screenshot of my summary for last month:

Top tip: On its own, this data is great, helping you be able to see a quick snapshot of how you’re performing. But if you track this data month-on-month, over a longer period of time, then you will be seeing much clearer trends of how you’re performing.

YOUR TWITTER ANALYTICS TWEET HIGHLIGHTS

Next to your summary, Twitter will also give you data on your Top Tweet, Top Mention, Top Follower and Top Media Tweet for that month. This is good to see some of your high-level engagement across the Twitter platform.

Here is a screenshot of some of my Tweet highlights for last month:

YOUR MONTHLY TOP TWEETS

If you click on “Tweets” at the top of the page, you’ll be able to see how many Tweets you sent out each month day and how many views, engagements and clicks you got.

You can click on the ‘choose date’ button, on the right of the page, to choose the time period you want to see your most popular Tweets from.

In the example above I’ve selected ‘January 2018’.

Next you’ll be able to select ‘Top Tweets’ to see your most popular tweets based on impressions and engagements for the time period you selected.

Impressions means how many times your tweet was seen (this could also mean the same person saw it multiple times). Engagement means how many times someone clicked on your tweet.

Looking at my top tweets each months allows me to see what my target audience are most interested in and what content gets seen or clicked on the most. I can then focus future tweets to talk about similar kind of content.

For example, it seems like a lot of people in my audience like the idea of working remotely. And I’m not surprised, since that’s exactly the type of people I love working with.

YOUR TWITTER AUDIENCE ANALYTICS

The next button at the top of your Twitter Analytics page is ‘Audience’. It allows you to see how many new people have followed you and what kind of people you have following you.

Here is a screenshot of my Twitter audience for the last 30 days:

As you can see, it’s growing steadily each month, with over 600 new followers every 30 days.

If you keep scrolling down, you’ll be able to see lots of data on the type of people you follow as well.

This gives me a rough idea of whether the type of people we are attracting are those that could be our potential client. In my case, I’m targeting professionals, business people and self-employed people – all of which are within my target audience.

It’s also worth noting that this data isn’t a complete list of your whole Twitter audience. In fact, it’s only a small snapshot of those from some of your audience. Twitter has to partner with other data companies in order to get this information, and it doesn’t yet have this data for the majority of its users. Still, it does give you a rough idea of the quality and types of people following you.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT “FOLLOWERS, LIKES AND ENGAGEMENT”

Although it’s great to see new followers, likes and engagement, in my opinion this isn’t the most important thing you need to be tracking. The most important thing you need to be tracking is the amount of leads and sales you generate in your business.

On Twitter, are you tracking how many leads you’re generating?

Are you even generating new leads with potential clients each month?

If you’d like to learn how you can do that, for free, then sign up to my online training session on ‘How to generate leads using Twitter for your business’. Look forward to seeing you there!

4 Ways to increase your Twitter engagement rate

Are you struggling to get people to see your tweets, your business or your personal brand on Twitter? Are you finding it hard to stand-out from everyone else on Twitter and be seen?

Here are 4 simple ways you can increase the engagement rate you get on Twitter.

The result in higher Twitter engagement rates? More leads, more sales and build stronger relationships with people (which is what social media is all about!)

#1 – TAG RELEVANT PEOPLE IN YOUR TWEETS

You probably already know you need to be posting relevant content regularly on all your social media channels. But are you also tagging relevant people, businesses or publications in your tweets?

When you go to your Twitter news feed, you’ll be bombarded by lots of tweets from everyone you follow. The life of a tweet also doesn’t last very long and it’s easy for your Tweet to get lost in the Twitter universe along with everyone else.

By tagging people, you increase the chances your Tweet stands out and gets seen by more people.

WHO DO YOU TAG?

As a best practice, I recommend you tag the person who created the content you’re sharing and the publication it appears on.

As you can see from the example above, this Tweet was written by @ChrisMarr and appeared on @HelloCMA

By tagging people you also increase the chances those people will retweet (share) it and you build stronger relationships with people in your community (as they will most likely thank you or be grateful you’re sharing their content)

#2 – ENGAGE WITH OTHERS FIRST

If you want more people to notice you on Twitter, you need to take the first step and engage with other people first.

Who do you need to engage with? I recommend you start with your clients, potential clients, strategic partners and then some key influencers in your industry.

How do I find people to engage with?

To easily find the right people to engage with, you can organise your Twitter followers by using ‘Twitter lists’ or searching for like-minded people using hashtags or other keywords on Twitter search.

What do you mean by ‘engaging’ with people?

Get involved in the conversation. It can be as simple as leaving a ‘like’, retweeting others content or replying back to their tweets with a thoughtful comment.

Why is engaging with others important?

Twitter’s algorithm will show your tweets to those more likely to be interested in your content. By engaging with others first, they will usually engage with you back. This tells Twitter that your content is relevant to the people engaging with you and their more likely to see your Tweets in the future. In short, the more people you engage with, the more people who will see your tweets in the future.

#3 – GET INVOLVED IN EVENT HASHTAGS

If you go to (or know about) any events (either online or face to face), there’s a high chance that the event has a hashtag that everyone at the event is using.

If you can know what are the events your potential clients are using, then you can very easily find your potential clients, by searching for the hashtag on Twitter.

Then, if those are your potential clients, get involved with the people at the event. Follow them, like their tweets and if you can get involved in the conversation by adding more value, then go for it!

Some of those people will follow you back and engage back with you too which again increase the chances they will see more of your tweets in the future.

Top tip: Ideally if you’re going to the event, it puts you in a great position to engage and use the hashtag. However, even if you’re not at the event, you could still get involved and find the right people to connect and engage with. Whatever you do, don’t do nothing! Get out there, talk to people and engage with your potential clients wherever they may be.

#4 – USE TWITTER DIRECT MESSAGES (THE RIGHT WAY)

There’s a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter DM’s. If you do it the right way, you can get some amazing results on Twitter. To help you out, here are a few do’s and don’ts when using Twitter DMs.

Don’t…

“Send a generic automated ‘thanks for following me!’ message.

Everyone does it. It’s boring and provides no value to people.

Send a message selling to people

Don’t sell. Always provide value first. There is a time and place to sell… but it’s not on Twitter DMs.

Talk about yourself too much

Don’t bore people with a long intro about who you are, what you do, etc. Make it always about them.

Automatically message everyone that follows you

There are tools that will automatically message everyone and anyone that follows you. There are times you can use automated messages to save you time, but it shouldn’t be used on everyone. It should be very targeted.

Do…

Send a specific conversational message to a specific type of person

Make sure the message is tailored to the type of person who receives it. For example, if you’re targeting business coaches/consultants and you send them a message, make it relevant to business coaches/consultants

Provide genuine value

The best way you can provide value to people is through free educational content that solves a problem your potential client has. Webinars, videos, blogs, etc are all content. It’s not so much about the format, but it’s more about the value you provide in the content.

Reply back and show that you’re human

When someone responds to your message, be sure to reply back if you can, so people see that you’re a real human whose answering messages and you’re not a robot. It also shows you care. Great relationships are built by having real conversations with people.

Message only people that follow you back

Don’t send random messages to people if they haven’t followed you. If people do follow you, it shows they are interested in what you do and then you can get to know the person a little bit better through a genuine and real conversation through Twitter DMs. You don’t have to message everyone that follows you, only pick out the ones you want to build a relationship with.

THE RESULTS?

Because of being consistent with our Twitter strategy, we generate hundreds of new followers and get thousands of profile views and impressions every single month.

Here’s a screenshot of my Twitter analytics for last month:

As you can see these are pretty high stats from only 27 Tweets and it’s worth mentioning these stats are 100% organic since we spend zero on Twitter paid advertising.

WANT TO LEARN HOW TO GENERATE LEADS ON TWITTER?

If you found the above tips useful, then sign up for our free Twitter training, where I go through how you can generate leads every single month for your business on Twitter without spending a penny on paid ads.

Click here to sign up for the free online Twitter training.

See you there!

Cracking the Code on Twitter Advertising.

It’s true — Twitter has its problems, but in certain cases and contexts, it truly is the best ad platform you’ll find — though ultimately it will depend on what you hope to accomplish.

But Twitter offers some unique ad targeting features you won’t find anywhere else. These are the unicorns in a sea of donkey ad features.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Facebook Ads, Google AdWords and Bing Ads. These advertising platforms all do a ton of things fantastically well.

1) Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting is a remarkably interesting and precise way to go after specific people who have demonstrated intent on Twitter.

You can target people who have used a specific word or hashtag in their Twitter update (or people who have interacted with tweets containing those words) in the last seven days.

Facebook doesn’t allow you to do this. On Facebook, you can’t target by keywords. Facebook only offers topic targeting.

What’s the difference? Well, on Facebook I can only go after people who are interested in AdWords as a topic.

On Twitter, I can get much more precise. I could target #ppcchat — a popular hashtag for marketers to talk about all things PPC.

Facebook has an exhaustive list of tens of thousands of topics. But as great as it is, Facebook doesn’t have a category for something as granular as #ppcchat.

Let’s look at one crazy example of this in practice: #FIFAgate.

I paid $25 to promote this tweet. It got 40,000 paid impressions (plus nearly 15,000 organic impressions!):

The promotion was hashtag-based. Only people interested in #FIFAgate saw it.

And something funny happened. This promoted tweet ended up being featured in an article, The 14 Best Tweets from FIFA gate. Odds are you want see something like that happen as a result of advertising on Facebook.

This shows just how amazingly powerful Twitter advertising can be. Instead of tweeting to everybody, you can only target people who are engaged with that topic.

2) Tailored Audiences

Did you know you can target every Twitter user who follows specific accounts with your Twitter ads? If you use a tool like BirdSong Analytics, it’s easy to download a list of every follower for any Twitter account and create your own tailored audience to target with your Twitter ads.

Facebook has custom audiences, which are awesome in their own way. But Twitter wins here because for Facebook custom audiences to work, you need to have the email address or phone number of the people you want to reach. That’s a big stumbling block.

What if you want to reach Facebook users but you don’t know their email or phone number? Sorry, you’re out of luck!

On Twitter, the bar is much lower. All you need is a Twitter user’s handle to reach people with your promoted tweets.

This really is the Holy Grail of Twitter advertising. Tailored audiences makes it super easy to get in front of any account.

3) Low Cost per Click

On Twitter you can get clicks for pennies. Literally.

The price of a click is based on the auction. It has everything to do what people are willing to pay.

Advertisers will find life is very cheap on Twitter because of the lack of advertising competition.

4) You Pay for Performance

When you promote tweets on Twitter, you only pay when you’ve achieved your marketing objective.

Whether your goal is website conversions or Twitter engagement, you only pay when people take that action (any additional organic impressions and engagements are free bonuses!) It’s the same for everything with Twitter.

If you run an app install campaign, you only pay for the number of successful app installs.

If you run a followers campaign, you only pay for the number of people who hit the Follow button and start following your account.

What’s really great here is that Twitter is shouldering some of the risk. Twitter believes their advertising product will deliver exactly what you want.

Compare this to LinkedIn, for example, which doesn’t offer any pay-for-performance advertising options. Facebook does offer pay-for-performance (page likes, app installs, link clicks), but Twitter can be far superior for lead generation.

Tweet Engager Targeting

Tweet engager targeting is another way to reach an audience in a remarkably targeted way. With this form of advertising, you remarket to people who recently saw or engaged with your tweet.

This is a real hidden gem of Twitter advertising. Rather than going for everybody on Twitter in a non-targeted way, you can target not only the people who saw your promoted tweet, but those people who actually engaged with it.

Targeted people who engaged with your tweets is Twitter’s version a laser-guided missile for finding the 1 percent of your most engaged users. Amazing stuff here!

Facebook doesn’t have anything comparable to this. The closest thing I can think of is Facebook’s great “hidden” invite button that lets you invite people who engaged with your posts to like your page.

Plus, there are huge advantages in Twitter’s system for having high engagement rates. You can learn more about this in my post, Hacking Twitter Ads: Mastering Twitter’s Secret Quality Adjusted Bids Algorithm.

5) Tailored Audiences