Any Twitter user can now access basic Analytics for their own account through a simple dashboard on Twitter’s website. This feature was once reserved for advertisers and Verified accounts, but has now been rolled out to the Public. Twitter originally tested incorporating some basic usage Analytics into user emails about their recent twitter activity, but quietly abandoned that feature in favor of developing this more complete dashboard. When confronted with this data, users will be able to see what kinds of tweets their followers want to see, and in turn this will likely encourage them to produce more compelling content which will increase interactivity and usage levels within their extended network.
The Tweet Activity section is an overview of the total impression volume by day for your tweets. As you can see in the chart above, Sundays have the worst impression volume for me. This could mean: I post less to Twitter on Sundays, my Followers use Twitter less on Sundays, I write less compelling content on Sundays (you mean everyone doesn’t want to retweet my brunch picture??) or any combination of these factors.
The “Tweets” tab within the main dashboard allows users to see some detailed stats about each individual tweet. Statistics available here include:
Impressions - number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter
Engagements - Total number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet. This includes all clicks anywhere on the Tweet [including hashtags, links, avatar, username, Tweet expansion, retweets, replies, follows, and favorites.]
Engagement Rate - The number of engagements [clicks, retweets, replies, follows and favorites] divided by the total number of impressions.
In the included example we can see how much better a tweet with a hashtag and [LM1] an @ mention performed compared to the more recent two. In the fourth Tweet, we can see how having an image improved the interaction rate (which in turn boosted it well beyond my average Tweet impressions. Obviously this is a small statistical sample, but it is not significantly different from results I have experienced since Twitter started visually embedding images into timelines.
The "Followers” section allows you to view:
- A timeline of Follower acquisition.
- The top publicly listed Interests of your Followers.
- The top Countries, States and Cities of most of your Followers.
- The Gender Split for most of your Followers.
- And the top Followed public accounts by users that you Follow.
All of this information will be beneficial to users looking to craft their message. What does my Follower base want to see from me? What are they most likely to interact with? If most of my Followers are in X Country, what time of day will my content best reach them? What do the Followings of my Followers tell me? Studying these factors will give you some great ideas for content, timing, and delivery that will improve your interaction rate and overall Twitter experience.
Along the right side of the main dashboard, you will also see graphs charting the last 28 days of your main engagement metrics. These are the aggregated daily numbers of the factors expressed your Individual Tweet Data (engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, favorites and replies). While these charts aren’t as useful as the more detailed sections outlined above, they sure are pretty and fun to look at!
Users interested in analyzing their own Tweet data.
Note: this is only available to accounts that are more than two weeks old; and not protected, suspended or restricted.