OOPSIE DOOPSIE

I don’t think it comes to any surprise [at least I hope it doesn’t] that I’m a fan of tracking, analytics, numbers. I’m a numbers freak. I maybe even played with the possibility of majoring in math in college. And, no, my math teaching mom had zero influence in this. Truth. But alas, I did not take that math path. Still doesn’t mean my passion, my curiosity, for facts and figures went away. It only intensified, baby! So you could only imagine my excitement when Twitter announced that analytics was now open for everyone. Great!

With my love comes a great burden. It’s easy to have all this data at your fingertips and have nowhere to go. It can become overwhelming and you stop to think, “what am I going to do with all this information?” Is it useful? Will someone else care what it says? The answer: not all information that is given to us helps. We suffer from an intense case of information overload, which is why we need to sift through the clutter to discover the gems.

With Twitter’s analytics, I have discovered a few [unconventional] ways to break out the data and use it to improve my efforts. Check it –

Filter ‘Good’ + Time of Tweet OR Filter ‘Best’ + Time of Tweet

Oops. Snuck in a little equation 🙂 But this is good. When I filtered my tweets for Good or Best and then checked the time I scheduled and/or sent the tweet, I noticed a correlation. Look in your analytics. Do you? If so, you just improved your tweeting performance.

For quick reference: Best is defined as the top 15% of tweets that received some level of engagement for the defined timeframe; Good is the top 2/3 of tweets with some level engagement for the same timeframe.

Download CSV

One thing I noticed immediately was the ability to download the data into a CSV file, and you can set a timeframe for this action [or select predetermined timeframes like past 30 days, past 90 days, etc]. Once I downloaded that baby and checked it out, I thought this would be such an easy way to track a hashtag‘s campaign engagement.

It also helped me track how often I spend communicating with my followers, more specifically, which individual followers. Devoting little to no time on others? Or perhaps making the conversation about you and one other person? Try spreading the love.

Those Everyday Metrics

And of course, the analytics data gives you the number of replies, retweets and favorites. Gone are the days of using third-party dashboards or tools to locate this info, or manually counting in your profile 🙂 In addition, Twitter analytics shows the clicks for each tweet. Hallelujah! As someone who does not schedule posts regularly or use third-party dashboards on a daily basis [such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Bit.ly], this gives me the opportunity to quickly see the effects of my post from the comfort of a single login. Feelin’ feisty? Shorten that URL with bit.ly and send via Twitter to do the ‘double-check’. If anything, the traditional metrics will reinforce findings.

Are you ready to jump into Twitter analytics? How are you using the data?