Twitter for marketers: 5 Common Questions about Twitter Analytics Answered

For more than 310 million monthly active users, Twitter has emerged as a micro blogging service where information are shared with enormous speed. For businesses Twitter can be a great channel to engage with their community. Not only for communicating or informing followers but it can also be a powerful marketing tool to engage with them interactively.

There are dozens of marketing experts who have shared momentous guidelines to use Twitter for marketers while promoting their brands, products and services. These guidelines can be a good start to set up a strategy and building engagement with your audience. Nevertheless, while taking a closer look at your Twitter analytics, often you become puzzled by several questions.

After gathering all the information regarding your company profile on Twitter, you are left with series of numbers. Now comes the difficult part - you need to interpret the data collected - and figure out where is room for improvement. To help marketers to make better decisions on Twitter, we have answered 5 most common questions that have been controversial on Quora.

1. Which are the most popular tweets

When your are promoting your brand on Twitter that means you are an active user and might have a high number of tweets each month. In increasingly crowded timelines it is hard to evaluate which tweets performed well and which did not. Based on likes, retweets and interaction rate, you can identify your most successful tweets.

This table shows the analyzed Twitter profiles and provides an overview of all latest own tweets and retweeted tweets along with likes and interaction rates. Looking at the table, you can easily identify the numbers of retweets, likes and replies created by users for every single tweet of the analyzed profiles. Now, based on this Twitter data you can adjust your strategy and publish more of your most successful tweets.

2. What is the best time to tweet

The timing of your tweets matter. That is why the question arises, how to discover the best time to tweet for your business. Although there are several easy approaches for best tweet timing, we truly believe there is no rule of thumb to receive highest engagement but it needs a detailed analysis of several aspects. The best time to tweet has a lot of dependencies like target audience, timezone, industry, etc. Therefore, it is more rational to find out your best time based on the stats of previous tweets time and their interaction / engagement rates.

The metric for tweets / interaction comparison helps you to identify own posting patterns and makes it easier to find out the perfect time to achieve highest engagement. Through this bubble chart, you can compare the effects of own tweets and the following interactions by day and hour. Thus, you can easily inspect on which day and at what time a profile or a group receives the highest interaction rate.

3. How to monitor hashtag performance

Using hashtags in your Twitter strategy can be highly beneficial for marketers because your posts are seen by people who do not follow you yet. A good hashtag can increase the reach per tweet and helps your marketing campaign to leave your own network.

Through the hashtag detection metric, you receive the stats of hashtags with highest interactions in a table chart. For a given profile, it presents the number of tweets where hashtags have been used and shows the specific number of interactions received. You can also analyze all hashtags being used from the profiles you are tracking. This sheds light on the best hashtags to use. Furthermore, it helps you to improve your own use of hashtags during your campaign.

4. How to track Twitter follower growth over time?

This is another important question regarding Twitter analytics for marketers. More followers generally lead to higher impressions and clicks. As your Twitter follower usually consist of important, or potentially important people for you, it is essential to track your follower growth over time.  Hence, it is necessary to track the number of followers over time.

The followers change rate metric helps you to compare the development of followers for given profiles over the analyzed time period. If you are interested in looking into this change as percentage format and comparing Twitter profiles of different sizes, then followers change rate metric should be the one of your Twitter KPIs. It shows the relative changes in followers which are also applicable for competitive analysis, which means you can not only track your own performance but also compare it to your competitors.

5.Which followers are most influential

Running an effective business campaign on Twitter requires networking with people who have a large audience that might be relevant for you. Therefore, it is important to identify the influencers who are positively mentioning you or your competition, as their audience could be potentially interested in the content you share.

By identifying the key interacting users of your profile, the key influencer metric solves this question. The table shows the number of mentions of the given profile by those users over a certain time period. If you run this analysis on a group level it will further show if a user interacted with more than one profile of that group. In this way, you can find out if the key interacting users of your profile also interact with competitor profiles. Analyzing Twitter data is essential as it brings valuable insights for your business. By using the right KPIs you can tailor your Twitter campaign and adjust it when necessary.

Do you have something in mind? Let us know. We are just one tweet away!