Twitter Opens Analytics Dashboard To Your Band
It's important to know what's happening with all that social media activity that so often seems to be an act of faith. Twitter's making it easier to keep up with the reach of your tweets on Twitter by opening their Tweet activity dashboard to all users. Previously available for advertisers and whoever Twitter deemed special enough to verify, Twitter's analytics may tell you some things you didn't know but leave you wanting more.
Given how many analytics products there are and how many of those have third party solutions to the problem of surfacing and displaying the most important information, I wouldn't expect Twitter's Tweet activity dashboard to tell me everything I need to know. But it's a nice clean dashboard for core information that I'm glad is easily accessible.
You should have this any day now if not already as long as you're:
- primarily tweeting in English, French, Japanese or Spanish
- your account's at least 14 days old
- your account doesn't violate Twitter policies or is restricted or protected
Additional info is available here or you can dive right in at analytics.twitter.com.
There you'll find analytics for tweets, followers and twitter cards. I don't have Twitter cards happening but the tweet analytics give me a good sense of reach (pretty darn broad), engagement (2%, a familiar number on my social media accounts) and various measures of recent activity.
Taking A Closer Look At Twitter's Analytics Dashboard
My frustration is that I can't click on a particular date to see what the heck was going on. Check this out from my last 28 days at @fluxresearch:
42.5k impressions? I'm famous! So why aren't I rich?
I can't click on that 6000+ day to get more info about what happened. But since it's only a month of stats I can scroll down until I hit that day and discover that it's a couple of tweets that got retweeted by people with big followings. They're famous. Not me.
Note that "Impressions" are defined as:
"Number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter."
Translated into reality that means the number of times a tweet was on the screen and could have been seen. Or something even less positive.
Call me Mr. Buzzkill but when you start looking at engagements and engagement rates that's when you get closer to what's up.
But note that "Engagements" are defined as:
"Total number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet. This includes all clicks anywhere on the Tweet (including hashtags, link, avatar, user name, and Tweet expansion), retweets, replies, follows, and favorites."
So Engagements aren't the number of people interacting with your tweet. Whatever that number is, it's lower.
For example, if I retweet something that has a pic that I can't see, that means I'll be responsible for at least 3 engagements: expanding the tweet, retweeting and favoriting (since I usually favorite when retweeting).
If there's a link involved, I'll hit that too. If I don't know you, for example, if someone else retweeted, I'll click on your avatar to see who you are. That's 5 engagements from one person.
As usual, the deeper I dig, the more I realize I'm just a superficial nobody like most everybody else. But at least now I have the stats to prove it.
More:
- Social Media Changes: Twitter Adds Noise, Vine Adds Editing, SlideShare Adds Video
- Complete Social Media Image Size Chart 2014: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube & More
- Twitter Redesign-In-Progress Offers Fresh Music Marketing Potential
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) recently launched DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
