Twitter Analytics

Screenshot: Twitter Analytics

This week’s cool tool is one many people aren’t even aware of: Twitter Analytics. It took the company forever to offer analytics but what they now have is pretty cool. It is, of course, tied to their advertising services but you need not pay for advertising to see your analytics.

How To Activate Twitter Analytics

  1. While logged in to your Twitter account, go to: http://ads.twitter.com/user/*/tweets
  2. Follow the prompts to set your country and time zone
  3. Clicking Next should bring you to https://ads.twitter.com/
  4. Click “set up credit card payment” (you do not need to buy any ads)
  5. When you’re done, visit http://analytics.twitter.com/ and you should have Twitter Analytics activated

You should get analytics data for your account activity from here on out.

Twitter Account Metrics

As you can see from the screenshot at the top of this post, you’ll get overall impression metrics by the day. You’ll also get:

  • Daily engagement rates
  • Daily link clicks
  • Daily retweets
  • Daily Favorites
  • Daily replies
  • Follower growth
  • Follower geography
  • Follower gender
  • Follower interests
  • And other accounts your followers follow

These metrics are useful to gauge how your account does over time. More fascinating, though are the individual tweet metrics.

Individual Tweet Analytics

For each tweet, you get the following:

Screenshot: Tweet Analytics

As you can see, at the individual tweet level, you get much more insight into the relevance and popularity of a given piece of content with your followers. In addition to overall impressions, you get:

  • Impressions by the hour
  • Media clicks
  • Link clicks
  • Favorites
  • Retweets
  • Detail expansions
  • Replies

Export Twitter Analytics

Finally, you also have the option to export your Twitter analytics data into a spreadsheet that contains even more metrics, such as:

  • Profile clicks
  • URL clicks
  • App opens
  • App installs
  • Follows
  • Email tweets

These analytics are a great way of understanding what content work best and what content doesn’t work at all with your followers and can inform content creation and marketing, as well.