You have a mere 140-characters to get their attention, how do you know what works and what flops? The obvious answer is metrics and Twitter has a system in place, so you can make the most of those 140-spaces. Analytics is how you draw all the right conclusions; you just need to know what you are looking at and how it fits into your plan. Make Twitter analytics as much a part of your process as creating a brand creative brief and positioning target ads.
Meet the Twitter Analytics Dashboard
They revamped it in 2014, so now the Tweet Activity Dashboard is a rich source of data for agencies looking to track Twitter marketing. When you open the dashboard, it gives you a month to month summary of your top performing text and media tweets. You have the option to click on each one to see the details or Tweet Activity.
The summary page gives you some basic monthly data, as well.
- Number of Tweets
- Tweet impressions
- Profile visits
- Followers
It tells you if your activity for the month is up or down, too. In other words, if you have added followers this month – good for you – you will see an up arrow.
The navigation menu at the top of the dashboard page breaks down the data further.
- Tweets – Each tweet you posted based on a rolling 28-day cycle. It includes a bar graph that you can hover over for more information, such as organic impressions.
- Audiences – An extensive look at who is viewing your tweets right down to interests, occupations, income and net worth.
- Twitter Cards – A Twitter card allows you to create dynamic tweets that cross multiple platforms. Twitter cards are a whole other blog post, but worth looking into if you are not familiar with them.
What are Tweet Impressions?
One potentially confusing term on the dashboard is tweet impressions. A tweet impression is the number of times a tweet is viewed. It proves the power of a good hashtag by showing you how your tweet performed on the Twitter stream. When someone types in a search term or clicks on a hashtag, Twitter will show them all the tweets that relate to it. For example, I post the following tweet:
Learn more about the Twitter Reporting Dashboard #Twitterstuff
If John Q. Public does a search on “Twitterstuff,” he sees my tweet in the results. That is a tweet impression. The same thing would happen if he clicked on that hashtag from another source.
Tweet impressions are a critical piece of data because one well-planned hashtag could generate thousands of them. If you manage the hashtags successfully, the number followers for a company or brand will grow.
What do you do with all this information? Learn from it and use it to hone your Twitter marketing. The Tweet Activity Dashboard offers a personalized view of each campaign, each brand and even every single tweet. With this tool in your toolbox, using Twitter is no longer guesswork. The social media network becomes a target rich environment that you leverage to enhance marketing efforts, develop brands and create conversions.
Darla F is a full-time freelance writer who specializes in helping agencies meet their goals by developing creative and engaging content.
