Tweet with Better Results Using Twitter Analytics

For those not steeped in pop culture or trending news, Twitter sometimes feels like a complete waste of time. You put information out there and whether or not someone actually responds to it is hit-or-miss.

Twitter has recently introduced a free tool called Twitter Analytics to help better inform you about how your posts are trending. Like the ever-popular Google Analytics, having data from Twitter that you can reference should help you to make more informed decisions about what, when, and how to tweet your links, media, and thoughts.

Twitter Analytics for Tweets

Understanding your Twitter followers’ preferences can guide you toward topics for future blog posts and conversation topics for future tweets. For companies and non-profits that don’t see a lot of interaction from their Twitter followers, this information is truly critical to maximizing this social media tool.

To access Twitter Analytics, simply visit this link and log in to your Twitter account. Right away, you see a dashboard of how your most recent posts have done, including how many:

• Mentions, follows, and unfollows have occurred in the past month
• Clicks you’ve received per-tweet
• Favorites, Retweets, and Replies you’ve received

You can also filter your recent tweets to showcase your best over time, thereby understanding much more about what your Twitter followers are looking for from you.

Twitter Analytics for Followers

From the second tab of Twitter Analytics, you find information about your Followers. This might be the most critical data of all. It helps answer key audience indicators such as:

• What are my followers interested in?
• What do my followers have in common?
• Where are my followers located?
• What personality traits might they share?

For instance, 75% of 816’s Twitter followers are interested in Business & Finance. This is useful to know, but there are a lot of news syndicates, experts, and others already sharing valuable information in that space.

Going a step deeper into what Twitter called “Unique Interests,” 64% of our Twitter followers are interested in topics relating to Leadership. 31% are interested in Startups.

Since most of our target clients are business leaders, usually in the formative stages of building their brands and businesses and/or just getting serious about creating an established brand, we can use this information to plan future blog posts or tweet news relating to these topics (using hashtags to draw in potential newbies). If we tie these tweets into a gentle sales pitch, we’re effectively using Twitter as the lead-generator we want it to be.

Have you tried out Twitter Analytics and, most importantly, have you gained any insight about your followers and tweets?