Introduction: How to Use Twitter Analytics

Social media today has become humongous! With billions of active users, it has extended its reach to every corner of the world. Because it has captivated eyes of billion users, marketers view it as their greatest tool for advertising. With its smart and interactive marketing features, it is a perfect fit for promoting any kind of goods or services. Amongst all the social media platforms, Twitter is one of the most influential ones. With its core user base falling between the age group of 16-34, it is a great platform to reach out to the millennials.

Marketing online however is not as easy as it seems. Have you ever put up an ad or an article online, only to wonder who had a look at it and who did not? Is it targeting the correct audience? If so, is it influential enough? To help you with all these questions, Twitter has a great tool called Twitter Analytics.

What is it?

Analytics provide you the means to understand your audience better. With its interactive and powerful dashboard, you can gain insight on all of your followers. What age group do they fall in? What region do they belong to? Be it their lifestyle or their ethnicity, it gives you information on all of it. This way, you can understand your audience better and make your post or “tweets” more specific towards them. In addition to that, you can track your tweets’ performance over time. The number of views they garner, number of people who read them, number of people who share them, you can essentially view all of that information in real time with Twitter Analytics.

In conclusion, whether you are a professional or not, if you seek to connect with your audience and aim to influence them more efficiently, Twitter Analytics is the apt tool for you.

What to expect?

In this instructable, we will be sharing with you the steps to master Twitter’s Analytics. You will learn how to work with dashboard features, like tweet activity and follower analysis. To further illustrate the features, we will present a short video walking you through the steps to use it.

Step 1: Tweet Activity

A lot of users don’t know how well their tweets are performing; this is because they don’t track their Twitter metrics or measure their Tweet activity. The Tweet Activity Dashboard displays a detailed analysis of your Twitter activity, helping you optimize your performance on Twitter.

The Tweet Activity Dashboard can be accessed by clicking on Tweets in the top menu of the main dashboard. From here, you can track:

  • Impressions: the number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter
  • Engagements: the number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet
  • Engagement rate: engagements divided by impressions – in other words, out of everyone who saw the tweet, what percentage of people did something with it?

In addition to viewing your overall Tweet performance, you can also access Tweet activity for each Tweet by clicking on the individual Tweets. From here, you can see more information on your engagements, such as the number of:

  • Media engagements
  • Detail expands
  • Likes
  • Link clicks
  • Retweets
  • Profile clicks
  • Replies

Outside of your Twitter Analytics Dashboard, you can get the Tweet activity for individual Tweets by clicking on the bar chart icon underneath the Tweet you are interested in. The process is the same for both web and mobile devices.

Now that you know how to use the Tweet Activity Dashboard, you should be able to measure your engagement and optimize your performance by making your Tweets more successful.

Step 2: Followers

Knowing your audience and what topics resonate your followers enables you to better connect with the people that are most relevant to you. Using the Audience Dashboard, you can learn more about your audience’s demographics and their purchasing behaviours, giving you the opportunity to use these interests as a good guideline for content and ideas.

The Audience Dashboard can be accessed by clicking on Audiences in the top menu of the main dashboard. From here, you will see four tabs that cover the following types of information:

  • Overview (a general summary of the other tabs)
  • Demographics
  • Lifestyle
  • Consumer behaviour
  • Mobile footprint

You can compare two audience segments by clicking on +Add comparison audience. You can choose from the following audience segments:

  • All Twitter users in the US
  • Your followers
  • Your organic audience: users who have viewed or engaged with your organic tweets

At this point, you can build a Twitter presence that speaks directly to your followers.

Step 3: Twitter Cards

Now that you have an understanding of your followers and what your twitter activities need to entail let us add learn about twitter cards. Twitter cards can be simply described as a tweet on steroids. Twitter cards allow us to have rich media that go beyond the standard 140-character message that twitter allows for a tweet. There are several types of twitter cards and they range from allowing your audience to download an app, watch a video, visit a landing page and other, etc.

Twitter cards are implemented by the adding the correct meta tags in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Meta tags are snippets of text that describes a page’s content. Meta tags are a great way to provide search engines with information about a website. Meta tags vary depending on the type of twitter cards to be used. To learn more about meta tags for twitter cards, visit: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-cards-g...

Here are some types of twitter card:

· Summary Card.

· Photo Card.

· Gallery Card.

· App Card.

· Player Card.

Summary cards attract those that see your tweet by including the title, thumbnail image and description of the tweet. This is a very good choice for marketing because social media users would be attracted to the thumbnail image and readers can easily find the information.

Mobile apps are really useful for social media marketing, what better way to advertise your app on your twitter account than using an app card? Mainly aimed at mobile app vendors, an app card is a type of twitter card that allows your followers to download an app from your tweet.

In general, twitter card is a great way to make your tweet more attractive and add more functionalities to your tweet. Attractiveness means a lot to social media marketing because there is always the need to impress readers.

Step 4: Learn More

This instructable explains the basics of twitter activity, followers,
and twitter cards. Here are some links for more information on this topics:

· Twitter Activity

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171990#

· Followers

https://business.twitter.com/en/analytics.html

· Twitter cards

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/twitter-cards-types/

As you plan to start social media marketing, here is an instructable with more information about twitter: https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Use-Twitt...

Now that you have mastered how to use Twitter analytics, here is an instructable to learn how to use Facebook as a community building tool: https://www.instructables.com/id/Facebook-As-a-Community-Building-Tool/ and an instructable for Instagram analytics: https://www.instructables.com/id/How-and-Why-to-Use-Instagram-Analytics/