How to read Twitter analytics without wanting to chuck your laptop out of the window

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I have never been a numbers gal and never will be. However, to improve my social media engagement and followers, I do need to understand the statistics so I see what is working (so I can do more of it) and what isn't. This post aims to be a beginners guide. By beginner, I mean those that have never really used the Twitter analytic dashboard before or have downloaded the stats and have found them to be really daunting.

So access your dashboard here

This is what the dashboard looks like, I will explain the 28 day summary first:



Tweets: This is the number of tweets you have written

Tweet Impressions: Number of times your tweet has been seen

Profile Visits: The number of people that have visited your profile

Mentions: The number of tweets that have contained your twitter handle

Followers: The number of people that have followed you

What can you take from this?

From here what is most useful I feel is followers, profile visits and mentions. This is because followers and mentions is a measure of engagement. people have actively included you in a Twitter handle or have clicked follow. Tweet impressions is more of a blurred metric in my eyes because Twitter cannot guarentee that every person has seen the tweet. I don't read every tweet on my feed. With the number of tweets it depends on what you want to measure. If it is number of tweets against engagement then yes that will be useful to see if it is the quality of tweets (i.e more people engaging with less tweets) or quantitiy driving your engagement. 

Let's go further down:



You can see above Twitter drills it down to your highlights from each month. The summary section which is the right hand column is the most useful as it is an overview on how well you did.


The next tab along is the tweet activity section. The graph shows, daily over 28 days, how many impressions your tweets made. Just run your arrow over one of the bars to see how many tweets you sent and how many impressions those tweets made.

Below is all the tweets you have sent and the impressions, engagement and engagement rate. 

Impressions: Are the number of times users saw the tweet.

Engagement: Is the number of times a user has engaged in that tweet. Engagement is classed as clicks on the tweet, retweets, replies, follows, favorites, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, profile photo, username or twitter expansion. 

Engagement Rate: Is the number of engagement divided by impressions.

Engagement I feel is the most useful metric because the user has openly engaged with what you have written. Impressions as I said above is I think is a little wishy washy, engagement rate however is useful, if your engagement is low this is because the number of impressions (which will be influenced by the number of tweets you have sent out) means that people are not interested in what you have tweeted.

Just a note the Video Activity tab also looks like it measures the same metrics but just focusing on the videos you have posted. I haven't taken a screenshot as I don't make videos but the dashboard looks exactly the same as the tweet activity section.

The next tab along contains what your followers are interested in, it is also split by gender. and what country and region your followers are from.




I found it surprising that I had pretty much a fifty fifty split in terms of gender however I am not a beauty or fashion blogger, I tweet about social media and my life in general so it does make sense. Region isn't as important to me as what I tweet again isn't based on locality however for those who are running small businesses you will want a large percentage of your audience to be from the region you are based.

A way you can focus your Twitter to local chats you can get involved with such as #midlandshour where the people and businesses you are advertising too will be based in that area. 

Now you have had a wonder around the dashboard the next post will be about downloading your stats and how to make the most of them.


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