Social Media Content Walkthrough: Getting the most out of Twitter Analytics Dec 6th, 2017 Knowing why statistics are important and the benefits you can gain from them is vital. Businesses love cold, hard stats that can tell them more about how their campaigns are performing, who their audience is and where conversions are coming from In the search marketing and indeed the wider digital industry one of the most important considerations for a business is their social media. This is without question the fastest way to contact their audience and expand it. If businesses are able to build their brand and trust through a series of social media posts, and these posts are in turn highly informative and shareable then there is no reason that they won’t see success. With this in mind and in accordance with our recent series of Walkthroughs, we continue with a look at Twitter, specifically the analytical side of the platform. Why use Twitter Analytics? For many, Twitter is the go-to social media platform, especially for businesses and getting a grip on the figures behind the post can help to tailor strategies and target future posts. The Twitter Analytics platform offers a wide range of information and can also help track performance. According to Hootsuite, the five main benefits of using Twitter Analytics are: Learn more about your audience It’s impossible to conduct a targeted Twitter campaign if you don’t know who you’re targeting. An understanding of the overall demographics of Twitter users is a good place to start, but it’s important to get a clear picture of exactly who your followers are, rather than just who uses the network in general. Using Twitter Analytics, you can dive deep into your follower demographics, learning what languages they speak and how they’re divided along gender lines, as well as their age, country of residence, and even household income. You can also gain valuable intel about their interests and online purchasing behavior. Find out what content resonates with your audience In general, tweets with photos get 313% more engagement. But is that true for your audience? It’s something you can test by tracking engagement through a Twitter analytics report. If it is true, what kind of photos do they want to see? Do photos of people work better than, say, charts and graphs? By keeping an eye on your engagement Twitter metrics, you can learn precisely what connects with your followers, so you can develop a Twitter voice that speaks directly to them. Post at optimal times An analysis of more than 40,000 @Hootsuite tweets shows that for the B2B Hootsuite audience, 3pm Monday to Friday is the optimal posting time, but others have seen different results. Part of the variation is based on geography. After all, 3pm in Vancouver is 6pm in New York, and 11pm in London. If your audience is primarily in the U.K., and you’re on the West Coast of North America, posting at 3pm your time is likely not ideal. Using Twitter Analytics, you can determine where most of your followers are based, so you can post at times that make sense based on when they’re likely to be online. Determine if ads are working When you’re investing money in promoted tweets, you want to know if you’re making good use of your advertising spend. By using Twitter Analytics for business insights, you can compare organic and promoted impressions to get a sense of how far your promoted tweets are expanding your reach. You can also set up conversion tracking to measure return on investment (ROI). Replicate success Carefully tracking your top tweets allows you to look for commonalities in the tweets that get the best results, while tracking your poorest performing tweets can provide hints about what your audience does not want to see. Knowing what works and what doesn’t, sets you up to replicate success while learning from misfires. Main dashboard – what are you tracking? Once you have opened up Twitter Analytics page you will be instructed to login and sync the platform with your profile. The first thing that you will notice is the Tweet activity dashboard (main dashboard)which shows a detailed analysis of a businesses Twitter activity both over the last 28 days and as a succinct report by month. If we look at the main overview (above) you can begin to see the picture of the last 28 days. You can track the number of tweets that have been sent from your account to ensure that your strategy is continuous and also that you are increasing activity at key times. The number of impressions can give you an insight as to whether or not you are posting at the right time. If you use a trial and error method of posting any research the optimum posting times you can increase this statistic and, in theory, the visits to your profile. The number of followers is the clearest indication of who is looking at your profile and who follows your brand. When this fluctuates, for better or worse, you are able to track growth and look at where the followers are coming from or going to. The last one of these metrics is the ‘mentions’ statistic, this will give you a clear indication if the content you are tweeting is informative, sharable and if it is sparking conversation. Another handy feature is that you can see both your top tweet and the monthly summary. These allow you to look at what has worked both individually and collectively. Using the MoM comparison you can track growth and plot your strategy moving forward. In terms of each individual tweet that is sent, you will be able to track: The number of impressions The number of engagements The engagement rate (impressions divided by engagements) Clicking on the individual tweets you can also pull up more specifics on engagements, such as the number of: Video views Link clicks Photo or video clicks Likes Retweets Replies Detail expands Profile clicks Clicking on the Tweets tab on the top level navigation offers an increasingly detailed analysis of how businesses tweets are performing. All of this data can be exported to curate reports and improve traction for the wider social media campaign. Looking at audience As you will be aware audience is the key to a social media strategy and if you are to improve on what you are doing, then you have to be able to understand who you are currently targeting and who you want to target. This information is all available from the ‘audience’ tab in the top level menu. Here you can look at the basics such as the gender, income and marital status of your audience. In business however these stats are often over looked as a ‘so what’ type of stat. What you want to know is if there is interest, not just what sort of person you are. That’s why the next tab shows the interests of the audience based on their followers, the details that they have filled in and their digital reading habits. If you are able to target future posts to these subjects you should, in theory, improve your conversion rate, the number of followers, mentions and interactions. If you want to expand their both locally and internationally are able to look at the location stats for information that will help them. For businesses who operate in a small, localised area, the region tab will break down where their audience is based and can offer suggested areas should they wish to branch out. The country tab shows which markets are already receptive to a business and where they might target in the future. Publishing tweets in other languages or that will appeal to other nationalities is a good way to get a head start. Navigating around these areas of analytics is highly informative and hugely relevant if you are looking for a more targeted approach to your social media strategy. The key takeaway is that you must stay on top of the stats and that adapting the way you operate in this space can be the difference between growth and stagnation. For more actionable insights from Click Consult, check our collection of resources and blog – or contact us today to see how the UK’s agency of the year can help you achieve your goals.