Twitter seems so real-time that it’s hard to step back to see what you’ve done on the platform. Use one of these Twitter analytics tools to better analyze your performance (or someone else’s).
Don’t count Twitter out.
In addition to marketing your business and connecting with customers, Twitter is the best social media channel to spy on your Twitter competition.
Whether you use Twitter for traffic driving, lead generation, influencer outreach, brand monitoring, or customer service, you need to measure your efforts. Luckily, you can choose from a variety of Twitter analytics tools to help you do this.
Which are the best Twitter analytics tools with which to get started?
Here’s a handy list!
1. Twitter Analytics
The native analytics accessible through Twitter.com are extensive and great to use for reporting and analysis.
Twitter analytics you’re presented with a 28-day summary of your Twitter account, which includes high-level trends (like the total number of tweets, new followers, profile views and mentions):
On the left, you’ll see your tweet highlights, which include …
Top tweet: The tweet that received the highest number of impressions
Top mention: The tweet that mentioned your @handle and received the highest number of impressions (This can include other people’s tweets.)
Top follower: The account with the highest follower count that followed you in the month
Top media tweet: The tweet with photo or video that received the highest number of impressions
Top card tweet: The tweet with a Twitter Card that received the highest number of impressions. (This can include other people’s tweets.)
On the right, you’ll see a few key stats of your Twitter account for the month. These numbers are great for reporting purposes—to show your monthly performance and determine month-over-month growth.
Best of all, Twitter’s analytics are free.
More importantly, you can access more detailed stats by clicking through to the “Tweets” tab. This section presents you with the full list of your tweets together with key metrics (impressions, engagements, and engagement rate) for each one.
Make sure to select the right date period for which you’re pulling data!
On top of that, you can download your full stats to an Excel doc from there you can use Excel powers to sort and filter your stats to identify best-performing tweets and trends that accounted for that success.
Related: Twitter 101: What Every Smart Social Media Manager Needs to Know
2. Keyhole
Once purely a hashtag analytics tool, Keyholeis now a multi-feature platform allowing you to analyze your Twitter account, monitor your brand and your competitors on Twitter, and even identify influencers.
Keyhole’s real-time hashtag monitoring dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag along with engagements and sentiment:
Another awesome component of Keyhole is its ability to track the most influential people engaging with your keywords. You can then reach out to them to promote your content and increase your brand’s reach.
This is great for Twitter event management when you want to keep an eye on your most active and influential participants.
If your resources are limited, focus your time targeting the people who will help you garner the greatest ROI for your campaigns.
Keyhole’s dashboards are easy to read and share, too. I’ve worked on several social media events in which we’re tracking how the event hashtag is doing during the day. I could easily screenshot data from Keyhole and share it with the team.
The ability to identify influencers, monitor competing brands, gain a deep understanding of target markets, as well as track hashtags and keywords, allows us to easily gain insights that come in handy for future campaigns.
Other Keyhole features are pretty impressive, too. For example, you can monitor your profile growth, account statistics (number of posts versus number of engagements), see your top posts by engagement, most engaging content types, and more:
You can do a one-time search for free on Keyhole, and they also offer a free 7-day trial. If you want ongoing support, different pricing plans are available starting at $99/month for hashtag analytics/monitoring section and at $29/month for profile analytics feature.
3. Agorapulse
Agorapulse’s Twitter reporting functionality is excellent.
Agorapulse’s Twitter report provides specific information for all the major elements. Tweets, mentions, retweets, and favorites are all included, in addition to top publishing and engagement stats.
The section also offers a closer look into your engagement:
As well as brand awareness trends (the number of mentions of your username and listening searches containing your brand name for the selected period):
The hashtag report also breaks down your top hashtags by interactions including retweets and likes:
If your goals are to achieve more interaction, this will help notify how you should craft messaging moving forward.
You can also access the full list of your tweets within the specified time frame to identify your best-performing content:
Additionally, the “Community management” tab lets you assess your team members’ effectiveness in managing replies and comments on Twitter.
It’s also a full Twitter tool—including publishing, listening, and social CRM for your tweets and followers.
If you want to test out Agorapulse, you’re in luck! They have a free trial AND a free quick analytics tool— Twitter Report Card. There are also a variety of subscriptions starting at $79/month.
4. Union Metrics
The most competitive aspects of Union Metrics‘ Twitter analytics are its competitive analysis and research components.
Users can stay ahead of the competition by analyzing their social activity and measuring share of voice.
Or you can combine powerful queries and historical data to uncover audiences, find relevant content, and plan campaigns.
Union Metrics’ free Twitter analytics report is a way to get quick answers to your biggest Twitter question. Analyze recent conversation about anything on Twitter–your account, your competitors, a campaign, a hashtag, a trend, a tweet.
Union Metrics has some free elements like the Twitter Analytics Report, in addition to custom plans starting at $49/month.
Bonus: Your Own Site
Finally, if one of your goals is to build traffic and inbound leads from Twitter (which is probably the case), you need to set up your own on-site analytics to monitor the impact from your Twitter activity and how it reflects on your bottom line.
For example, Google Analytics allows you to measure the effectiveness of your Twitter traffic (as compared to other social media channels):
Other web analytics platforms would dig even deeper. For example, Finteza allows you to explore your Twitter audience demographics, including countries/cities they are coming from, devices they are using, etc. All that information will help you craft more targeted Twitter marketing campaigns and make more informed marketing decisions.
Depending on your objectives, there are a few powerful Twitter analytics tools to address every need. With these four awesome resources at your disposal, you can easily take your Twitter marketing to the next level.
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