It’s now been over 3 months since Twitter allowed everyone access to their accounts analytics. This has given us all a chance to get used to the interface, and interact with the information. If you haven’t been using Twitter analytics for your company account or your personal account, in which your purpose is to gain an audience and establish yourself as an expert in your field of expertise, I recommend you start now.
Of course, analytics are not the end all be all of, really, anything. But they are a useful tool that Twitter is handing you, so why not use it to your company’s or, even your personal, advantage?
Feedback
Since my post about Twitter’s freely accessible analytics, Twitter has made some very slight changes. The layout overall has remained consisted, and has proved to be fairly accessible and easy to use.
But I do have one complaint and that is the “Followers” section.
The information on this page is, for the most part, fine, but I highly dislike that there is no way to select dates to make note of follower growth or see more details. Instead, you are stuck moving your mouse across the line of your followers, attempting to see the date you want. Its not very user friendly, and doesn’t give you a lot of information to go off of. It is just too much information squeezed into a tiny space and makes it difficult to see the growth that has happened or when it has happened.
The other issues is that it only goes back as far as 2012. That’s, I suppose, understandable, but if your only going to display information from 2012 forward, it would be nice to segment that information a bit more specifically.
And one final complaint about this section. Note the date on the screenshot I’ve added: 10/6/14. The day I snagged this image was 10/17/14 so obviously there’s a great deal of lag happening here. I noted in my previous post that it seemed to take a day or two to catch up with your follower data, but now it appears to be a lag of 10 days, which is a bit much.
While Twitter’s analytics on followers has a bit of work to do, overall the analytics for impressions and engagement has worked perfectly for me thus far. I love the fact that you can click on specific tweets and see the interaction people are having with those tweets. It is also helpful to see which hashtags or Twitter profiles tend to gain the most exposure.
A Twitter Analytics Update
Twitter has included an update that is really very helpful: date selection. When looking at your Tweet Activity you’ll notice that you are now able to change the dates you are looking at from the last 28 days, to a specific month. This is very helpful when comparing month over month, and can help you catch any drop off in impressions or engagement. It also allows you to access the tweets that were driving that high engagement rate you might have lost, and see what you need to do to get it back.
Conclusion
Twitter analytics has allowed for a more refined Twitter strategy for all the accounts that I handle, both company accounts and personal accounts. It has helped me improve traffic through the use of hashtags and user handles. While I’m still perfecting it, and let’s be honest, social media takes a lot of perfecting, we are able to take a more in depth look at what is working and more importantly, see if we can figure out WHY its working.
And surprisingly we’ve found that sometimes its not about hashtags or user handles, its about the keywords you place in your tweet that really draw the attention of a crowd. In fact, some of our highest engagement and impression tweets have been ones free of hashtags or user handles.
Liked this post? Then you might enjoy these other articles from the BizBlog:
How to Use #Hashtag Marketing for Your Business
Reputation Management: Monitoring the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly