How to Use Twitter Analytics as a Blogger

Twitter has become my favorite social network, although sort of my default. Facebook is full of babies and homophobes, Instagram is a bit too braggy, and don’t even get my started on Snapchat (I don’t use it because I’m not 13 years old). All jokes aside, Twitter is the place for everything from ground-breaking news to a place to promote your own blog posts. It’s safe to say that most bloggers use Twitter, but a good chunk of them aren’t using the analytics platform that Twitter provides (for free!). Here’s a quick rundown of how to use Twitter Analytics as a blogger.

You can see your own Twitter analytics here (just make sure you’re already logged in).

On the “Home” tab, you’ll see a 28 day summary with changes over the previous 28 days. For example, my numbers seemed to be positive this month (hooray!), with increases in impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers. You’ll also then see monthly details from the past year, including your top tweet, mention and follower from that month. An example of my monthly overview is shown below. Yes, the real Taye Diggs followed me on Twitter. Be jealous.

The next tab to check out is the “Tweets” tab. This lets you see in-depth details of your tweets, including impressions (the numbers of times users saw the tweet on Twitter), engagements (the total number of times a user has interacted with a tweet, including clicks, replies, retweets, follows and favorites), and the engagement rate (the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions). You can view data from the past 7 days, past month, or any custom time frame you’re looking for. Here’s a look at a tweet of mine from June.

If you click into “View Tweet details” you will see a breakdown of some key metrics as well as impressions over time. This shows that Twitter is extremely time-sensitive. Most people saw my tweet within an hour or two of posting it, and the rate declined after that. This can change depending on the amount of people who follow you, how frequent others post in their news feed, etc. This is why it’s important to post to Twitter at the best times/the times your followers are most likely to see your tweet.

The next tab is labeled “Followers” and gives you insight into, you guessed it, your followers. You’ll see a basic overview, followed my demographic and lifestyle statistics, consumer behavior and your mobile footprint. My followers’ top interest is fashion, their top language in English (otherwise, how are they reading my tweets?), their top lifestyle type is online buyers, their top buying style is ethnic explorers, and their top wireless carrier is Verizon. So what does this tell me? The majority of my followers enjoy when I tweet about fashion and are highly likely to purchase from something I post on Twitter.

You can also dig deeper and see other data (not just the “top” traits for your audiences). For example, although 56% of my audience is interested in fashion, 37% are interested in beauty and cosmetics and 33% are interested in technology. This shows that I have a diverse audience, and lets me know what type of content I should be posting more of and less of. You’ll also see a breakdown by gender (67% of my followers are female, 33% are male), their household income (20% of my followers make between 75k and 99k, damn!), marital status (53% of my followers are married), and occupation (my top two audiences are homemakers and professionals/technical workers).

There’s a lot more you can find through using Twitter Analytics, but this should be a good start. So tell me — what interesting things did you find when you checked out your Twitter account’s analytics?