Before I start writing on Twitter Analytics, I would like to bust a myth - "Twitter analytics is only available for accounts that have advertised on Twitter."
That statement is not true. Twitter is slowly rolling out its own analytics dashboard to a handful of Twitter users.
Here's a sneak peek into Twitter's very own world of analytics:
1. How do I access Twitter analytics?
Click on the gear symbol when you are logged on to Twitter and click on Twitter ads - you should see this option if Twitter has rolled out advertising for your account.
2. After you reach the Twitter ad dashboard, you need to click on analytics.
3. Let's take a look at the three sub-categories under analytics:
a) Timeline Activity
There's a lot of data there! For a period of one month, Twitter gives me the mentions, followers gained, followers lost and a summary of how each of my Tweets performed. This amount of detailing is as good as Facebook page insights or LinkedIn company page analytics. The only drawback is that it doesn't give me an option to select a date range.
But if I choose to download the data, this is what I see:
b) Followers
This tab gives incredible data. Let's take a look:
- Trend in number of followers
- Demographic Information of Followers (including their interests)
Another important piece of information that you get is "who are your followers following?"
c) websites
Once you have the code that Twitter provides on your website, you will be able to see the behavior/demographic data of Tweeples coming to your website. If you use Google analytics to track social campaign effectiveness, this is something that you already get.
Conclusion: A lot of brands do Twitter contests to engage their followers. It takes a considerable amount of investment (in terms of effort) to conduct a successful Twitter contest. It does help though when you can pinpoint the number of new followers that you received and the amount of interactivity/exposure your Tweets got to your clients. Twitter analytics will help you justify crazy ideas that you end up executing ☺
This should start the doom of tools like Crowdbooster which give you nothing more than Twitter analytics can offer. However, we still see some inaccuracies in Twitter analytics which I am sure will go out of the window with time.
Have you seen Twitter analytics roll out for your accounts as yet? Let us know.