How to Use Twitter Analytics for Content Marketing

Keith Reinhard, the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, reminded us on Adweek a couple of weeks ago that marketing and advertising have always been about connecting brands with people, and we need to remember that human nature stays pretty constant.

Although the technology landscape is constantly changing, it’s useful to understand and utilize the constants in our lives (and marketing plans) as well.

Twitter Analytics is one tool that can provide valuable data for marketers to understand people, connect with them, and tell stories they love.

Although we’ve been using Twitter Analytics since it was open to the public, the webinar hosted by Twitter last month gave me some deeper insights, especially on how to use the tool for content marketing.

Twitter Analytics_Content MKT

Know Your Audience

Understanding who you are talking to is an essential step before you start talking. Twitter Analytics can help you with this by providing visualized and easy-understanding data about your followers.

In the Followers tab in Twitter Analytics, you can see the top five to ten interests your followers have. Jimmy Hang, the host of the webinar, explained that the interests are estimated based on the accounts your followers are following. The percentage beside each interest shows the accuracy of estimation. You can also see the gender and location makeup of your followers.

This kind of important information can help you to make sure that you are creating something that suites your audience’s interests and needs. Moreover, you can also use them as guidelines for other aspects of your content creation such as graphic design style for an infographic, or the tone in which you write a blog post.

Twitter Analytics_User Profile

Learn Through Engagement

Engagement has always been seen as one of the key metrics to evaluate social media performance, but it can tell you much more than that. Twitter Analytics gives you a more comprehensive way to understand your Twitter engagement. You can take a deeper look into how your audience reacts to your content and then optimize the content you share in the future.

In the Tweets tab you can see the number of impressions, engagement rate, and types of engagement in a customizable date range. The engagement rate represents the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions which shows that, out of everyone who saw the tweet, what percentage of them replied, retweeted, favorited, or clicked on the tweet.

Twitter Analytics_engagement

Clicking on a specific tweet will show you more details including number of impressions, link clicks, retweets, replies, favorites, user profile clicks, and detail expands.

Twitter Analytics_details

Twitter Analytics distinguishes between four types of engagement: reply, retweet, favorite, and click.

Some marketers had questions about which type of engagement to look at when evaluating their marketing effort. Jimmy gave us some advice during the webinar. Regarding replies and retweets, marketers should decide which one is more important according to their objectives. If your objective is to interact with your customer and drive purchase, reply is the metric you should pay more attention to. If you want to promote organic content and amplify a message, retweets is number that is more valuable.

Different types of engagement can also tell you about your followers’ attitudes toward your content. According to Buffer, retweets is more of a sign of value because someone finds your tweet valuable enough to share with their audience. While favorites can be a sign of appreciation. Your tweet resonated with someone else, and they wanted to give a virtual high-five.

Keep Track of Your Content Performance

A report issued by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently showed that while 70% of content marketers said that they created more content in 2014 than they did in 2013, more are finding it difficult to track performance. Well, Twitter Analytics can also be a tool to track your content marketing ROI!

With the introduction of Twitter Cards, you are now able to enrich your tweets with additional content, media and calls to action. If you are using it, you should definitely check out the Twitter Cards tab in Twitter Analytics. Based on the type of cards you are using, you could track the number of URL clicks, install attempts, platforms used to send Tweets that linked to your content, etc.

Twitter Analytics-Twitter Cards

To access Twitter Analytics, just go to analytics.twitter.com and it will forward you to the results of the account you are currently logged in within your browser.

Have fun with it! And thanks for reading.

Bianca Hu – Digital Marketing Specialist at Delightful Communications

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