Twitter Analytics: A Beginner's Guide

Have you looked at Twitter Analytics? Assuming you don't use any other analytics tools for Twitter, you'll find some very useful information.

Everyone can access this by going to Twitter Analytics and signing in with your usual Twitter credentials. Here's what you can learn from the official Twitter Analytics.

Timeline Activity

In the Timeline Activity section of your analytics, the first thing you'll see is an overview graph of your last 30 days on Twitter.

Next, you will see some basic stats for your tweets including clicks, favorites, retweets, and replies. You can use this section to see which topics resonate the best with your audience and the most popular times you tweet.

If you use Buffer, you can get similar stats in the analytics section of your dashboard with the added bonus of seeing who retweeted your posts.

The two added bonuses for Twitter analytics over Buffer's data is that you can filter your tweets to see just the best ones, and you can export the data to CSV.

Follower Demographics

In the followers section of your Twitter analytics, you'll get some good insights about those who follow you. First, you will see your change in followers over the last year.

Next, you'll see a list of topics your followers are interested in.

This can be helpful in determining whether the audience you are building is relevant to your business. If not, then you need to re-evaluate your Twitter audience building strategies.

Next, you can get see where your Twitter followers are located.

This is especially useful if you have a local business as you want to make sure you're growing an audience in the right region. It can also help if you're trying to determine when to post status updates.

Last, but not least, you can see the gender distribution of your followers and discover who your followers are also following.

If you have less than 10,000 followers, you can learn more about them by running the free Twitter Follower Report on Simply Measured. A few things on the free report include the top keywords in your followers' Twitter bios.

You can also see the top time zones your followers are located within.

And your followers with the most followers.

If you want to see your Twitter growth over a longer period of time, try TwitterCounter. If you subscribe to a premium account, you can see your follower growth for up to five years.

You can even add a competitor's Twitter account to see how your follower growth stacks up to theirs.

Website Analytics

Last, but not least, Twitter analytics allows you to add your website to see analytics in relation to tweets of links from our website in the websites section. To set up your Twitter website analytics, just click on the Add Website button, add a piece of code to your website's header tag, and verify. Then you will be able to see the following.

This graph shows you the number of tweets including your URL for the past 30 days. The chart below shows the individual tweets plus popularity data (favorites, retweets, and replies). You can use this section to see your top engagers on Twitter.

In addition to seeing those who tweet links from your website, you can see the tweets that get clicks under the Link Clicks section.

If you want to learn more about tweets for content on your domain, you can also try a search on Topsy for your domain.

If you want to know what tweets drive the most traffic and conversions on your website, sign up for a premium account to the Campalyst Tweet Lookup Plugin. This Google Chrome extension will allow you to see individual tweets within your Google Analytics account by looking at the referral paths under the t.co referrer. It basically turns the ugly t.co URLs into real tweets.

The only unfortunate part about using this plugin / extension is that it doesn't pull historical data, so you will have to wait for new tweets to start generating traffic to your website before you will see extended information about them.

Do you find Twitter's official analytics useful? Please share your thoughts and alternative Twitter analytics tools in the comments!

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