Boosting Engagement with Twitter Dashboard & Analytics

Although relatively young, social media marketing has rapidly grown into a valuable marketing channel. It’s got a huge audience: 65% of American adults use social networking sites (it was just 7% back in 2005) and 75% of all Internet users in the US do the same. Even more importantly, there’s a positive correlation between social media use, education level and household income.

However, in order to make the most of your marketing efforts, you need to be able to measure and track your progress. To make analytics easier for marketers and to encourage businesses to engage more with their followers, Twitter’s launched a new analytics Dashboard to complement its Analytics feature. In this piece we’ll cover the features of Twitter’s new Dashboard, how to get set up and some of the important metrics you should be tracking on its analytics platform.

Glossary of Terms

We’ll start with a glossary of terms used in the new dashboard. If you’re an experienced social media marketer you are probably already familiar with many of these terms, but it’s good to make sure we’re all starting on the same page.

• App install attempts: Number of clicks to install an application from a Tweet Card.
• App opens: Number of clicks to open an application from a Tweet Card.
• Detail expands: Number of users who clicked to expand the more details menu.
• Embedded media clicks: Users who have clicked to view an image or video embedded in a tweet.
• Engagements: Total number of users who have interacted with a tweet by clicking retweet, reply, follow, like, links, cards, hashtags, embedded images or videos, usernames, profile pictures or the more details expansion.
• Engagement rate: Average engagements per tweet.
• Likes: The total number of likes a tweet has received.
• Follows: The total number of followers that can be attributed as a direct result of a tweet.
• Hashtag clicks: Total number of clicks on hashtags in a tweet.
• Impressions: Total number of Twitter users who have seen your tweet.
• Leads submitted: Total number of users who have submitted information via a Lead Generation Card.
• Link clicks: Total number of users who have clicked a URL linked in a tweet.
• Permalink clicks: Total number of users who have clicked on a tweet’s permalink (Note: this is only available to desktop users).
• Replies: Total number of users who have replied to your tweet.
• Retweets: Total number of users who have retweeted your tweet.
• Shared via email: The total number of users who have emailed your tweet.
• Profile clicks: Number of users who have clicked on your @name handle or profile photo of your tweet.

The New Dashboard

Custom Feed

With 310 million active monthly users, Twitter is one of the “Big Three” social networks — along with Facebook and Google+. For marketers, Twitter is a useful channel for reaching target audiences in all stages of the conversion funnel.

To help businesses reach and interact with these audiences, Twitter debuted its Dashboard Analytics Tool. Dashboard collects important engagement data into one place, giving marketers an overhead view of key performance metrics, as well as letting them drill down to evaluate the performance of individual Tweets.

One of the features you can use right away is your custom feed — you’ll set this up when you first access the Dashboard. If you only rely on mentions to track how people are talking about your business online you’re probably missing out on a large part of the conversation. Twitter’s custom feed lets you find any tweet that mentions one of your keywords or phrases, giving you a more complete and accurate view of how people are tweeting about you, your business and/or your products.

When you set up the custom feed, Twitter will automatically include your name and @username as search terms, but will also prompt you to add and/or remove positive and negative search terms. You can include or exclude any words, phrases or hashtags you think are relevant.

You can go back and change your custom feed keywords any time in the About You tab of the Home screen.

Schedule Tweets

Since Twitter is a global platform, it’s got users living in every timezone. Even if you’re a local business with targets in one city or region, finding the right time for a tweet to go live is crucial to getting your message in front of your audience (we’ll talk about dayparting later on). This may not always be during your normal business hours. Twitter Dashboard allows you to create a tweet and schedule it to post at the optimal date and time according to your marketing plan.

To schedule a tweet click the Create tab and write your tweet as you normally would. Click the down arrow and pick Schedule Tweet. Enter the date and time you want to send out your post then click Schedule Tweet to add it to your queue. You can access your queue to edit or delete a pending tweet by clicking Edit on queued tweet.

You can schedule a tweet on the Dashboard iOS app as well by composing the tweet, tapping next and selecting Schedule Tweet.

If you find yourself struggling to come up with ideas for tweets, Dashboard offers up tips and topic suggestions geared to help businesses start conversations with their target audiences.

Twitter Analytics: What Do I Do With All This Information?

Tracking Data with Dashboard

The new Twitter Dashboard offers users a bird’s eye view of their important metrics for up to 60 days: tweets, media tweets, replies, audience growth, new followers, profile visits and tweet impressions. This is useful information for tracking your overall Twitter performance.

You can see the performance of individual posts in the tweets tabs. You can see stats for your most recent tweets or you can get a list of your most recent follower engagements. This is useful information when you’re tracking the reach and audience engagement of your Twitter activity.

This is good stuff to help you when putting together your Twitter marketing plan. Look at your recent tweets to see which type are getting the most total impressions, retweets and likes and which tweets have the highest engagement rates (total engagements per impression). Use recent engagements to spot potential trends, or if certain tweets are driving a certain kind of engagement.

Using Twitter Analytics

For a more detailed look at Twitter data for your business, use Twitter’s Analytics platform. The Tweets tab offers a detailed, granular look at how you’re driving engagement with your Twitter audience. Where Dashboard tells you how many likes, replies and retweets a tweet got, Analytics counts total engagements (but sadly you have to export the data to a CSV to break it out by engagement type). Check out your Top Tweets to see your tweets sorted by total engagements.

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by Maria Lopez via SitePoint