Twitter has recently released an extensive array of metrics and analytics features on its Ads dashboard. This is obviously in order to promote their Twitter Ads platform, but it can be an extremely beneficial tool for your business, even if you don’t currently purchase advertising on the microblogging site.
That’s right: the Twitter analytics tools are free for everyone. This is a great service for anyone who might have been paying for their analytics with a third party. Bad news for analytics providers, but great news for your business!
The analytics dashboard allows any users to view the performance of their tweets. They can see how many Replies, Retweets or Faves the tweet has received. This could reveal important information on which types of tweets spark the most audience engagement in your community.
The tool also lets users sort by “best,” “good,” or “all,” so they can quickly analyze the performance of their tweets.
To access this tool, the process is simple. Navigate to ads.twitter.com and sign in. If you click on the “Analytics” link at the top, you’ll be there. By doing it this way, you don’t have to worry about the Twitter Advertising sign-up process, since you already have a Twitter account.
An Overview
One advantage of this tool is that it reveals common Twitter trends that might be helpful for traffic and gaining business – but these are trends that might not be apparent without analytics.
For instance, tweets that have a lot of Faves and Replies typically don’t do as well in terms of Retweets.
While this is a somewhat simple observation, it’s important to discover ideas like this through the analytics tool, because it can help you learn which posts will be the most successful.
And if you’re wondering how much engagement your Twitter account is actually producing, you can download all of the analytics as a CSV. You’ll be able to see exactly how many people are clicking on the links you tweet, which will be eye-opening if you want to increase engagement.
What Does This Mean for Your Business?
Twitter’s business site urges users to “connect what you do on Twitter to the impact it makes on your business.”
It’s important to be ambitious about creating success through social networking. You want your Twitter account to grow and make an impact, because if it doesn’t, you’re wasting your time.
So decide on some goals, and determine which types of metrics you want to look at. Twitter offers various options:
- Track followers. You’ll be able to view how many new followers you gain every day, week or month. This will help you determine how successful your social media marketing is.
- What types of engagement? You want numbers. Numbers will help you see how effectively your interactions are with your followers. You can see the overall number of users that interact with your account, but you can also look more specifically at how many people favorite or retweet your tweets.
- Analyze traffic. It’s a basic concept of social media marketing, but it shouldn’t be overlooked. You need to know how many users visit your site.
- Look at the conversion rate. You can look at how many users sign up for your service, as well as how many users click on or buy your product. This is extremely important to increasing profits and establishing a loyal customer base.
The Comprehensive Timeline
Another part of Twitter’s Ads Dashboard is the timeline activity. This is ideal for large businesses that have an extensive amount of activity on Twitter.
The timeline activity function allows you to comprehensively view every bit of activity, learn about the behavior and trends of your followers and consider ways to fine-tune your campaign for prime results.
By analyzing how every tweet performs with mentions, you’ll be able to see trends and opportunities you might have missed in the first place.
Getting to Know Your Followers
The dashboard offers another tool appropriately named “Followers.” A vivid, organized graph not only tracks how your follower base grows from month to month, but it also organizes insights about your followers’ interests, geography and engagement.
These types of findings can be valuable to generating more engagement, potential followers/customers and in the end-profit:
- Twitter analytics will rank your followers’ interests by percentages. It will tell you if 12% are interested in Home Décor, while 60% are interested in Finance.
- It will also find the most unique interests. This is a great feature, because it helps you cover all the bases. If this tool is able to tell you that 5% of your followers are interested in Language learning, you’ll be able to gain a better perspective on what your audience is looking for.
- It gives you in-depth geographical data. Knowing where your followers are from says a lot about your market and their expectations. Twitter not only maps out the top countries and states, but it’ll give you the percentages of the top cities your followers are from.
- Twitter will break your engagement down by gender. We already know that Twitter will provide data on engagement levels, but it will also track the percentages of males and females that retweet your posts. Click here to read more about what Twitter analytics can do for your business.
All of these features will allow you to better understand what your followers want and the types of service and products they expect.
Since Twitter’s new analytics feature is completely free, it’s the perfect option if you’re looking to take a closer look at your metrics and make improvements on your campaign!
But Wait – What If I Don’t See My Analytics?
Although the new Twitter analytics have created quite a stir in the marketing community as of late, not every account has access to the free analytics tools just yet. The release of free analytics had a much larger response than anticipated, so not every account has access to it.
It is not known whether Twitter plans to expand this tool to everyone yet, but if you want to use it right away you can create an advertising campaign. Some bloggers have been claiming that you can create a campaign and immediately cancel it to gain free access to the analytics.
Do you have access to the new Twitter Analytics tools? What are your first impressions?
