New Twitter creators focus on two things:
- Creating valuable content
- Being consistent with publishing
While this is great and the right way to approach Twitter growth, there’s one thing most of them often overlook:
Data.
Pro creators are data-backed creators. They create content based on what data tells them.
Data and metrics allow you to understand your content at a deeper level. You might think one tweet underperformed when in reality, even if it didn’t bring many likes, it got a ton of link clicks.
And the other way around. You might have announced a new project, getting a ton of engagement on your tweet. But then, when you check how many people visited your site or bought your product…crickets.
Data and metrics allow us to understand why these things happen.
By now, you might be wondering how you can unlock access to this side of Twitter. Keep reading to find out!
Small note, to become a data-backed creator, you need actual data. For that, you need to tweet. If you feel stuck on getting Twitter ideas, check out this article on 24 things to tweet for when you run out of tweet ideas.
How to use Twitter analytics
Some Twitter users are unaware that the platform allows you to access your account's metrics and data for free. There are two ways you can do that:
- You can check the metrics from an individual tweet
- Or you can access the Twitter analytics page
Let’s see the how-to 👇
How to check a single tweet analytics
Doing this is quite simple. Follow these steps:
Go to your Twitter profile
Click on the tweet you want to know more of
Click on “View tweet analytics” at the bottom of the tweet
- A pop-up with your tweet’s analytics will appear
For now, don’t worry about what all of these mean. We’ll get to that in a bit.
How to find your Twitter analytics
Seeing a single tweet's analytics might be helpful, but you might want to see how your account performs on a more general level.
To do that, you need to access the dedicated Twitter analytics page. Here’s how:
Go to Twitter’s home feed and click on the “More” button on the left-side column.
When the window opens, click on Analytics. Alternatively, you can directly visit https://analytics.twitter.com/
- A new page will open with a bunch of elements. These are the ones you need to pay attention to:
- Top bar with an overview of your last 28 days
- A month-by-month summary of your account’s performance at a glimpse
From here, we can extract useful information about our account and our content’s performance.
But that’s not everything. If you pay attention to the top of the page, you’ll see another tab labeled as “Tweets”.
When you click on it, this opens:
We have three different elements here:
A bar graphic on the top side where we can see the impressions that our content go in the last 28 days (you can select different timeframes too)
A tweet-by-tweet metric breakdown. The tweets show in chronological order
The right side column where you can see details of your engagement rate, your link clicks, your likes, your retweets, and your replies for the selected timeframe.
All this information allows us to study our content’s data even deeper.
Bonus tip: if you are a data nerd, you can download the entirety of your tweets into one spreadsheet. You only need to click the “Export data” button on the top right side of the page and select if you want the data by tweet or day.
What are profile visits on Twitter analytics? Metrics and their meaning
This data is useless if we don’t know what we are looking at.
In this section, we’ll briefly explain what each of these concepts means.
Let’s get started:
Impressions: Refers to the number of times your tweet has been seen
Engagements: This refers to the number of total engagements your tweet had. Those can be broken down into the following
Detail expands: This means how many times people have clicked on the tweet to check the replies
Profile clicks: How many people clicked on your profile via this tweet
Likes: how many likes the tweet had
Replies: how many replies the tweet had
Retweets: how many retweets the tweet had
Link clicks: how many link clicks the tweet had
There’s one more metric that doesn’t appear in this picture but that’s also important. You’ll see it on the “Tweets” side of the analytics.
We are talking about the engagement rate. The engagement rate, often expressed in %, refers to the number of engagements in relation to the total number of impressions.
It’s a good measure to know how “successful” a tweet was, as the engagement rate considers every type of engagement to calculate the %. Remember what we said before about likes and RTs not being everything to measure a tweet’s success.
Analytics on Tweet Hunter
Twitter analytics is great, but it’s not perfect. There’s plenty of information and honestly, it can be overwhelming.
That’s why we've made our own interpretation of Twitter analytics at Tweet Hunter.
The goal is to keep it simpler and, at the same time, showcase the data with more clarity. To access the feature, go to the left column and click on “My analytics.”
Tweet hunter’s analytics will open. It’s made of 4 parts.
A top bar
Very similar to Twitter’s, where you can see your account’s performance at a glance. Here’s where you also select the timeframe you want to use to check out your data.
Tweets that generated the most followers, reach, or engagement
This is where you can see a recap of your best-performing tweets, depending on if you are filtering for followers, reach, or engagement.
Daily follower gain
If we keep scrolling, we’ll see a section where we can see our follower growth by day. This is great to understand which tweets got more followers, as it’s easy to correlate the tweets posted on a certain day with the followers gained.
Detailed tweet performance
Last but not least, my favorite part of Tweet Hunter’s analytics is the detailed tweet performance.
Unlike twitter’s analytics, here you can actually filter by each category and order them.
Tweet Hunter doesn’t do anything more than Twitter can, but it does a way better job at presenting the information.
Frequently Asked Questions
By now, you should know almost everything you need to know to become a data-backed creator. But before we leave, let us solve some of the most common questions related to Twitter analytics.
How to use Google analytics with Twitter
One thing you can do with Google Analytics is tracking your site's traffic from Twitter. To do so, simply:
Open your Google Analytics account
Go to “Acquisition,” then “All traffic”, then “Source/Medium”
There, you’ll see traffic coming from either twitter.com or t.co
You can do way more complex operations related to GA and Twitter, but those usually require advanced tech skills. If you want to dig deeper, check out this article.
Can you see who visited your Twitter profile?
The age-old question of knowing who visited your profile. The short answer is NO.
The long answer is still no. You can see how many people visited your Twitter profile, but you can’t see who they are. That’s still very relevant information, though!
By the way, if you are struggling with your Twitter profile, here are 21 examples of great Twitter bios for you to check out.
Next steps
If you want to level up on Twitter, you’ll do well by taking your Twitter data more seriously. There’s so much you can learn and improve from just looking at it.
A tweet got a lot of profile clicks? Double down on tweets on that topic as they are getting people’s attention
A tweet got a bunch of likes but not profile clicks? There’s something about the tweet or how your profile looks that it’s not drawing people’s eyes.
These are just two examples. There’s plenty more you can learn if you look at your numbers.
Do so and it will be your unfair advantage!
