How to Find and Use Twitter Analytics

When it comes to social media, Twitter is a classic. One of the oldest social networks, this fast-paced microblogging site has 335 million monthly active users. Because Twitter moves so quickly, it can be hard to identify which tweets are doing well and how your account is doing overall. That’s where analytics comes in. So let’s take a look at Twitter’s analytics.

(Note: Since Ely Social doesn’t currently have a Twitter presence, the screenshots are from consultant Jalyn Ely’s personal Twitter account.)

How to Find Twitter Analytics

Twitter does offer both personal and business accounts, but you can access analytics for both types of accounts. Accessing Twitter’s analytics is easy – log into Twitter, click on your profile picture in the top right corner, then click “Analytics.”

If you haven’t accessed Twitter analytics on your account before, it will prompt you to click a button to activate analytics.

And there you are! You can access all of the analytics available to you in the analytics dashboard.

What’s in Twitter Analytics

The main screen is the Tweet Activity screen. You will see your tweet activity for the past 28 days (you can adjust the date range by selecting a time frame in the “Last 28 Days” dropdown menu). You will see a lot of data on your tweets.

At the top is an Impressions graph, which shows how many people have seen your tweets in the selected date range and a bar graph that shows how many impressions you got per day (blue bars) and how many tweets you tweeted on each day (gray bars).

Directly below that is all your tweets in that period, ordered by date (most recent on top). You can adjust this view by selecting Top Tweets (which will rank your tweets by how popular they are), Tweets and Replies (which will show both your tweets and tweets you made replying to other people, ordered by date), or Promoted (which will show you how well any tweets you paid to promote are doing).

The right column is line graphs with how well you did in different metrics (like engagement rate, likes, and retweets) per day as well as an average over the selected period.

At the top are a few more options.

The default view is Tweets. You can also select Audience to view insights about your Twitter followers (if you have enough followers), Events to see events that Twitter users are tweeting about, and under More, you can select Videos to view analytics about videos you’ve posted and Conversion Tracking to install a tag on your website to track who clicks to your website from Twitter.

How to Use Twitter Analytics

That was a lot! Twitter has really robust analytics for you to use. So how do you use Twitter analytics?

One of the easiest ways to use Twitter analytics is to explore your top tweets over the last few months. Which tweets got the best engagement? What seem to be the patterns or common themes? Or on the other hand, which tweets did really poorly? This will help inform what you should tweet about in the future to get a better response.

You can also look at your impressions graph to see what days your tweets do best. Maybe your tweets seem to get the most impressions on Tuesdays, in which case you should tweet extra on Tuesdays to maximize your reach.

Finally, if you have enough followers, you can look at the Audience tab to get data on them. Maybe you thought you were tweeting for middle-aged business professionals, but your audience turns out to be mostly Millennials. Knowing who your audience is can help inform what you tweet.

There are a lot of things you can do with Twitter analytics to fine-tune your tweeting strategy to get the best response. These ideas are only a few of the things you can do. Explore all the data available to you and see what you can learn!

The Advantages of Twitter’s New, Longer Tweets

Twitter is famous for its 140-character limit for its tweets. And whether you think that’s a good thing for preventing rambling posts or a bad thing for limiting the nuance and context that can be included, it’s become a defining feature of the site.

But that defining feature is becoming a feature of the past. Twitter still places an emphasis on brevity, but the old 140-character restriction is falling by the wayside.

Twitter has been testing allowing 280-character tweets, but yesterday began rolling the feature out for all users – once the rollout is complete, only those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (languages that use fewer characters overall) will be stuck to the old 140-character limit. People tweeting in all other languages will be able to use 280 characters to express themselves on Twitter.

Why?

When Twitter was in its early years, many users used texts to receive tweets. The 140-character limit was imposed to allow each tweet to fit into a single text message. People using Twitter still found ways to cram more into tweets, though, whether that’s including a screenshot of a large block of text or creating multi-part tweets. And now, most people access Twitter though the app, not via text.

Twitter has recently been easing restrictions to allow people to put more into a tweet. In September 2016, they stopped letting features like polls, photos, and videos count against the character limit. This is an attempt to reengage their audience and get users to tweet more – by reducing the frustration and annoyance of having to edit your thoughts down to 140 characters, Twitter hopes you will be tempted to tweet more.

Is this a good idea?

Some will say yes, some will say no. Long-time Twitter users will find the change strange and may have a hard time getting used to it. I predict most users, though, will appreciate that they have to do less editing of their tweets to fit the character requirement.

Personally, I like the idea – the 280-character limit means that you still won’t get long, rambling posts like you can on other social networks, but it allows for more nuance, detail, and context, all of which I think are important for both posting and engaging with other people. It definitely will take some getting used to, but I think it will make for more human-sounding tweets – and maybe fewer (or at least shorter) Twitter arguments.

What does this mean for marketing?

The main benefit to those marketing on Twitter is the added ability to add detail, context, and human-ness to your tweets. 140 characters doesn’t give you a lot of room to include friendliness and necessary detail in your responses to customers – the new 280-character limit will let you sound more open and human, and it will let you more fully address their concerns without asking them to call or email you.

And if you’re one of the many who already has access to this feature, take advantage of it! Your longer tweets will stand out while people are still getting used to them.