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At first glance, the Twitter Analytics Dashboard offers an intuitive top-level view of your stats – a macro scan of your retweets, follows, favourites and overall audience engagement. We covered all the basics in the first part of this series, here.

More Than A Numbers Game

For a more thorough breakdown of your stats, the platform also features the ability to export your data from the Twitter API as a CSV file. This is where all the number crunching starts to get a little more interesting.

Take things to a more detailed, micro level by re-organizing your engagement metrics or filtering out any data you don’t want to include in your spreadsheet. Don’t think user profile clicks are a good assessment of what you’re looking for? Get them out of there. Likewise, manipulate the data to pinpoint the days of the week – down to the time of day – you see the most interaction from your followers. Not sure what else you can do with all of this? Read on for some Twitspiration:

Keep An Eye On Who’s Keeping An Eye On You

Clicking on the Followers tab in the main dashboard reveals a graphic view of the number of your Twitter followers over time. It also includes a breakdown of your audience by interests, location, gender  and even charts who they follow – an invaluable pool of information right at your fingertips if you know what to do with it.

Start by filtering out the tweets with the highest levels of engagement – as defined by you – in your spreadsheet and further sort by type of content, time of day (to figure out the best time to Tweet and which have worked best in terms of driving engagement). By now, you should start to notice some trends in the data. Do you see a handful of followers that consistently engage with your content? These are your ‘influencers’. Identifying who’s sharing the most and nurturing those relationships is a great first step to growing your online presence and driving traffic to your Twitter feed.

Streamline Your Content to Maximize Its Perceived Value

Now, you need to ask yourself – What’s your end goal? Growing your follower base? Increasing overall engagement? Are you looking to grow towards a definitive number (a static metric)? By a given rate over time (exponentially rising to some ceiling-less target)? Once you’ve worked this out, you can start putting a game plan into place.

Are your followers more likely to favourite rather than retweet your content? Favourites are a good indication that your Tweet resonated positively with your audience – sort of like a virtual high five. Retweets demonstrate perceived value – your followers not only liked what they saw, but wanted to share what was communicated. This is useful in driving up impressions and potential engagements.

Impressions are useful in determining the best times and days to tweet. Dividing your number of follows by total impressions gives you an indication of your Follow Rate. Want to track the impact of paid campaigns? Deduce your cost per follow by dividing your total spend by the number of new followers generated by its efforts.

Once you start to develop a deeper insight into what piques your followers’ interests, you can start analyzing and streamlining your content accordingly.

Key Takeaway

Twitter isn’t solely a traffic-generation tool for your business. Social networking serves as a public platform for your brand voice. It’s about connecting with the right people and engaging them in meaningful conversation – picking up a few brand ambassadors along the way is simply an added plus.

Do you use Twitter Analytics? Lets us know your favourite stats or strategies in the comments below.