Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has become one of the strongest and most powerful platforms that companies have at their disposal. As inbound marketers, you know how to use Twitter to push out content, drive traffic and create user engagement. And now Twitter is bringing out the big guns by making the site even more useful.
On Tuesday, Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Web Analytics, so that website owners can see in a few simple clicks exactly how much traffic they receive from their tweets and how effective this is for their company. What does this mean and how will it benefit us inbound marketers? Don’t sweat it, we’ll break it down for you!
First off, for now it seems like Twitter Analytics is back and forth on who can access the content. While Twitter representatives have declined to comment on when the tool will be available to more users, if not all, they have reported that so far they are happy with users’ responses and therefore have little reason not to roll it out to the rest of its faithful users. And just because you can’t access the content right now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t immediately learn how to use it. Think of how when your company gains access, you can dive right in instead of fiddling around with it for a while.
To view Twitter Analytics, visit click here, and sign in using your normal Twitter username and password. This is where you’ll find out if you’re one of the lucky users that have been selected to access to this new inbound marketing goldmine. If you have been granted admission, congrats and read on; if not, read on anyways to see how you’ll eventually benefit.
Timeline Activity Analytics: This dashboard provides a summary of how many mentions and followers you’ve gained over the past month, and unfortunately, how many users have unfollowed you as well. Twitter also sorts your tweets into three categories based on the level of engagement they’ve created. “Best” tweets are the top 15% of your tweets that have the highest level of engagement, “good” tweets are the next 2/3 that have a few retweets and “all” are the rest of your tweets that maybe haven’t fared as well. Each category ranks each of your tweets by the number of favorites, retweets and replies they have received. Furthermore, you can see how many click-throughs you’ve gained for any tweeted links. If a tweet is particularly outstanding, Analytics adds a “4x Normal Reach” notification which should signal to you that there’s something extra-special about that tweet and you can adapt and grow out of that specific strategy.
Follower Activity Analytics: The follower dashboard displays your follower growth overtime and a breakdown of their demographics, including gender, location and (prepare yourself) even the top most followed people who your followers follow.
What’s All This Mean?: While Twitter has previously provided a downloadable Twitter Archive that allows you to see how many tweets you’ve sent per month, this service is like the Archive on steroids. You should be using this service to gain some serious insight into how your Twitter strategy works and how it can improve. You can also see at what specific time of day your tweets and links are getting noticed. Analytics allows you to download all of this data into an Excel spreadsheet, from which you can analyze what type of tweets are attracting the most attention. Are funny pictures getting the most retweets? Or is your blog attracting all the favorites? And which tweets were completely ignored? Finding out which tweets are the most popular and imitating those is a sure way to generate more engagement with other users, push out more content and attract more followers. Now that’s smart marketing.
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By ImageWorksLLC intern Lindsey Havansek