For years, sending and optimizing tweets has been an imprecise art. With nothing but the local metrics of
First, head over to https://analytics.twitter.com and log in. You'll notice a list of your recent tweets accompanied by Impressions (how many times each tweet was displayed to other users), Engagements (retweets, replies, favorites) and Engagement Rate (engagements divided by impressions). What was particularly surprising to me was the low number of Impressions relative to Followers. Even having several thousand Followers does not guarantee more than a few hundred Impressions, and will result in even less in the event that your Followers themselves follow a large number of accounts. For this reason, it is even more important to be looking at your best performing tweets and trying to replicate the conditions that led to their success.
Where the true value in Twitter data is, I believe, in the export feature. Once you've exported all your Tweets into a spreadsheet, you can sort by any number of different metrics. Here's a handful of key places to look.
Engagements can be misleading, as they represent a whole host of different interactions, including expanding the tweet in the browser window, clicking your username or avatar, or displaying the picture. You'll notice when you attach an image, this results in considerably more Engagements as most people can't help but expand images to view them in full. This means, when you have the spare characters, don't hesitate to add an image.
Depending on the content you're sharing and your intended audience, the optimal timing of your tweet will vary. Start by sorting a sample of your tweets by a specific metric --I recommend Engagement Rate or URL clicks-- paste the top performers into a new sheet, and then sort again by time of day. Then, look into the text of the tweet, and see what types of posts, whether it's sharing your content, someone else's, or a job post, to see when each sort of post is best sent. Learning when your audience is most likely to be scrolling their feed is an easy way to increase your tweet performance.
How have you made use of Twitter Analytics? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!