There’s a lot of focus on how many followers a business has on Twitter, but not many businesses take the time to understand their audience. Without analyzing your Twitter followers, you’re just making assumptions about what content to share.

Get The Right Tools

Instead of manually reviewing all of your followers, use a tool that will allow you to analyze them. Twitter’s native analytics can give you some great information on the demographics of your followers, which is a great place to start.

Using a third party tool can help you learn more than just demographics.

Now that you have the tools you need to analyze your Twitter followers, here’s how to do it effectively.

How Many Fake Followers do You Have?

A while back, it was revealed that over 20 million of Twitter’s users were bots. With that many automated accounts, there’s a good chance that you have at least a small percentage of bots following you. Even though these accounts make your follower count look bigger, they don’t actually add any value.

While some brands intentionally use deceptive tactics like buying fake followers, you could be Tweeting to an audience of bots without even knowing it. These bots mass follow random accounts in order to appear like real users. So if your account ends up on their list, you could be one of the people they follow. The first step in analyzing your Twitter followers is spotting the fakes.

One of the main reasons that finding the number of fake followers is important is because they can skew your data. Your analytics might not be accurate if, for example, 70% of your followers are male but 30% of your followers are fake.

If a large percentage of your followers are robots or fake accounts, it is advisable to work on growing your audience first. The numbers might not be exact, but this will give you a general idea to start with.

You can’t make bots stop following you, but you might be able to get them to by asking or reporting them. Having a few bots following you isn’t going to hurt your account, but the more real followers you have, the more accurate your data will be.

What Do Your Followers Tweet About?

Once you know how many genuine followers you have, the next step is to find out what topics they are tweeting about. This will help you produce content that your audience wants to see. If they can relate to your tweets, they will be more likely to engage.

Instead of taking the time to manually go through each of your Twitter followers’ timelines, you can use Twitter’s analytics to get a broad overview of their interests.

(source: wordstream.com) You can see what people are tweeting about your brand when they mention it.

In short, by reading these two reports, you can learn what content to share and how to be discovered by new people.

When Are Your Followers Active?

Twitter is known for being noisy, with hundreds of new Tweets every second. This means that fewer people see your Tweets, and you get less engagement.

Try to learn the Tweeting habits of your followers in order to increase the likelihood of them seeing your Tweets. Most of your followers won’t see your Tweets, but the goal is to increase your chances as much as possible.

The best way to find the best time to Tweet is to experiment and track your results. How do you find the best time to Tweet? Some research says that the best time to Tweet is ____, but keep in mind that this is just an average. Your followers may not all be on Twitter at the times these studies say are the most active, so the best way to find out the best time to Tweet for YOUR followers is to experiment and track your results.

There are a couple of options for finding out when your followers are most likely to engage.

You can look at the time your most engaging tweets were sent to try and spot a trend, but this requires a lot of time and only works if your tweets are already getting engagement.

Which Influencers Are Following Me?

Building a relationship with an influencer on Twitter can help you grow your audience and become an authority in your industry. To get the most out of your relationship with an influencer, you need to engage with them.

You will not be notified if an influencer starts following you on Twitter- you will only get the same type of notification you would from any other user. Therefore, it is your responsibility to go through your Twitter followers and identify which ones are influencers.

What are some ways to find out about influential people on Twitter without manually checking every time you get a new follower notification?

Buzzsumo

You can use Buzzsumo to see if any influencers are sharing content from your site. To do this, copy the URL of one of your top posts and paste it into Buzzsumo’s content research tool.

Then click on View Sharers to see a list of all the people who Tweeted a link to that particular post.

This list could be a mix of people who follow you and some who don’t. Find the influencers who have shared your content and give them a follow. They’re already interested in your content, so you can focus on building genuine relationships.

The benefits of tracking Twitter analytics

The 3 main benefits of using Twitter Analytics are:

Learning what your audience really wants

Analytics from Twitter will give you an idea of what content your followers appreciate the most. Whether it be text posts, photos, videos, polls, or cat GIFs, this information can help you better understand your audience.

If you don’t have data, you won’t be able to tell for certain what content will be successful and what will fail.

Tracking your growth

Twitter analytics can help you track your follower growth or loss over time so you can see trends.

Analytics data can show you which types of content are attracting new followers or causing people to unsubscribe.

Figuring out the best time to post

The first question my friends ask me when we meet up for dinner isn’t about how I am. Instead, they ask me what the best time to post on Twitter is.

The secret to finding the perfect time to post on social media is that there is no one perfect time that works for everyone. It depends on when your audience is online and if they span multiple time zones.

The Twitter analytics feature lets you see when your tweets are getting the most engagement. You can use this data to see patterns for what times of day are most successful for tweeting. Don’t worry too much about it, though: a significant portion of American users checks Twitter at least once a day.

The best time to post on social media is 8 am on Mondays and Thursdays.

What can you track with Twitter analytics?

Here’s what you can find out with Twitter analytics.

The dashboard page

This is what you see when you first navigate to Twitter analytics. It shows you a monthly overview of your top stats, including your:

• Top Tweet (by number of impressions)
• Top mention (by engagements)
• Top media Tweet (ones that include an image or video)
• Top follower (the person with the most followers who started following you in the current month)

This app also gives you a brief overview of your activity for that month.

The Tweets page

The “Tweets” option is next on the top menu. As you can see from my Twitter account, I had a lot of impressions on November 23. The graph is a helpful way to quickly see content trends at a glance.

You can view the number of people who have seen your tweets and the engagement rate over a period of time by going to the default settings, which is set for the past 28 days. You can also see statistics for your promoted tweets (paid advertising) in this same location.

Along the right side, you can also view your average:

• Engagement rate
• Link clicks
• Retweets
• Likes
• Replies

The video page

The “More” tab at the top of the page provides access to the video page. This page displays statistics only for videos uploaded through Twitter’s Media Studio or for Promoted Video ads.

Like the Tweets page, you can view similar video engagement stats here:

• Views
• Completion rate (how many people watched until the end)
• Total video minutes viewed
• Retention rate

Twitter’s Media Studio provides more detailed analytics, such as when your audience is online and the top Tweets and comments people are saying about you.

The conversion tracking page

The “More” tab also contains the conversion tracking page. In order to use it, you need to first set up Twitter conversion tracking on your website. Once it is set up, you will be able to see conversion data for Twitter Ads here, and you can export it as a .CSV file.

The Business Insights Dashboard

Twitter has a Business Insights page that is difficult to find and not part of the Twitter analytics dashboard.

I found the Twitter Advertising Analytics by chance. It is in the Twitter for Business under Advertising -> Analytics.

Then, click on “Visit yours now” at the bottom of the page under the “Business Insights Dashboard” header.

Twitter analytics can be found by navigating to the Twitter website and logging in. Once you are logged in, you will see a tab on the top of the screen that says “Twitter Ads.” Click on that tab and then select “Analytics” from the drop-down menu.

 6 Twitter metrics to track for the best results

1. The number of followers you have 2. How often your tweets are retweeted 3. The ratio of your followers to the number of people you follow 4. How often you tweet 5. The average number of blog posts you share per day 6. The average number of times your tweets are favorited 7. The topics you tweet about most often 8. The average number of @replies you receive per day 9. The average number of retweets you receive per day 10. The average number of hashtags you use per tweet 11. The average number of characters you use per tweet These are eleven Twitter analytics metrics that you should care about. Some will be more important to you than others, but these are generally the ones you should pay attention to. They are as follows: 1. The number of followers you have 2. How often your tweets are retweeted 3. The ratio of your followers to the number of people you follow 4. How often you tweet 5. The average number of blog posts you share per day 6. The average number of times your tweets are favorited 7. The

Twitter hashtag analytics

Impressions

The number of views your Tweet received, otherwise known as its “view count.”

The number of people who see your content, combined with the number of people who interact with it, gives you an idea of how successful your content is.

Sometimes the hashtags you use can have a big impact on the number of impressions you get, so experiment with different ones to see what works best.

Top Tweet

Twitter will show you your most popular Tweet from each month on your Twitter analytics dashboard. You can also find your Tweets listed with their engagement rate on the Tweets page.

What this means is that you should give your audience more of what they are responding to the most.

Follower gain/loss

This metric shows the number of followers you gained or lost over a specific time period. This information is available in both the Dashboard and Tweets pages.

This is one of the most important Twitter metrics to track for most businesses as it is a good indication of growth alongside engagement metrics.

Top followers

This is the person who has the most followers out of everyone who recently followed you. You can see this information on your Dashboard page.

Why is this important? If Justin Bieber follows you on social media and you don’t realize it, it could be a big deal. This is a quick and easy way to track the people who are important to you.

Top mention

The Tweet with the most engagements that mentions you (@yourname) for the selected time period can be found on the main Dashboard page.

It is important to see what people are saying about you on Twitter because it can help identify patterns. If you respond to a mention quickly, it will likely be popular. Seeing your previous popular mentions can help you determine what people are saying about you in general.

Twitter engagement analytics

Engagements

What it is: The big juice! That includes:

• Link clicks
• Hashtag clicks
• Expanding to view the full Tweet
• Clicking your Twitter profile photo or username
• Retweets
• Replies
• Follows
• Likes

So, just about everything then.

Why these statistics are important is because they help give you an idea of how engaged your Twitter followers are with your Tweets. You can view detailed statistics for each of the different engagements, such as likes, retweets, and replies. This way, you can get a better idea of what content is resonating well with your audience and what isn’t.

It is helpful to have a general overview of your engagements so you can see which tweets are effective and which are not.

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time jump into your Twitter analytics. But don’t stop there—use your findings to improve your Twitter marketing strategy.