Thursday 28th August is a momentous day for Twitter users everywhere (well as long as your account has existed for longer than 2 weeks) as Twitter releases analytics for all users. This means that you can track many different things about your account and whether you just want to become the ‘most read’ of all your friends on Twitter or you want to get down to the hard tactics of tweeting as a business, this tool is for you.
The interface is really simple and looks great. It’s only available on desktop at the moment but no doubt there will be a mobile version in development. Its main features are its ability to track individual tweets for interactions such as favourites, retweets, replies, clicks, link click through rate and other measurements. It also gives your some generalised data about your followers allowing you to hone your target audience to exactly what they want to hear!
The main graph of the first page contains a quick overview of your recent tweets. It will adjust its measurement scales to your usage so you can always get a quick view of how your Twitter account is faring.
It shows you how many ‘impressions’ your tweets have earnt over the past day and how this compares to the last 28 days. This basically shows you how many people have viewed your tweets in the last 28 days, however remember ‘viewed’ just means that it appeared in their news feed, it is likely they will have scrolled past it. It is still a good measurement to track though because you can look back and see (hopefully) that your impressions are growing. This is similar to the ‘reach’ measurement in facebook analytics for pages.
You then get a summary of every tweet you’ve sent in what we’ve lovingly termed the ‘tweet lowdown’. You can filter by just your tweets, your tweets and replies, or any tweets you’ve promoted through Twitter’s paid ad feature. You can then see their impressions, engagements and the engagement rate which is relative to other tweets in the Twittersphere.
Down the right hand side of the page is some more detailed breakdowns of your individual engagements.
This information is all in relation to your previous tweets and you can compare easily back against the last 28 days.
One of the best features of the new release by far is the ability to export the data and manipulate it manually. This can help you see whether particular words in your tweets result in particular activity or hashtags. You can also measure what time of the day is best for you to tweet at.
You can also find out loads about your followers’ interests, gender and location to their top and most unusual interests. One of the most interesting metrics is who else your followers follow.
You can also view your follower growth here aswell
We’re very excited about this update and trust you will be too. Does this mean that tweet management tools like hootsuite and buffer will ad more free features soon? We hope so, but in the meantime, we’re still holding out for scheduling on Twitter!
To sign up for analytics (if you haven’t already signed up for Twitter ads) you can go here and follow the instructions. Your tweets will start showing up from that point forwards and after a while you can get good measurements.