Of all social networks, Twitter produces the largest volume of accessible social data.
Every day, millions upon millions of tweets are posted in the form of advertising, customer complaints, political discussions, sports commentary and much much more.
From a data perspective, this makes Twitter analytics quite interesting as you have a huge volume of data to work with. The data needs to be accurate of course, but for social media analytics, Twitter offers volume that other networks struggle to match.
Naturally, this also make analyzing that data a bit tricky - to do it well you need good tools. Ideally, you get the most accuracy and most powerful analytics from a paid tool (like Talkwalker of course), but if you're a smaller company or are trying to work out how social listening can benefit your business, free tools can come in very handy.
So following on from our series of blogs on tools for tasks like Instagram analytics and influencer marketing, this time we decided to look at the top free Twitter analytics tools on the market with views from industry experts.
(Note: Many of these tools also have paid versions available)
Twitonomy - Deep Dive
Twitonomy gives you your headline Twitter stats all on one easy to read page. It also gives you your averages, as well as useful stats like retweets per tweet and mentions per tweet. You can even see the times of day you tweet the most, and breakdowns of your most interactive followers. The recently introduced geolocation feature is also a nice addition to get an idea of where your audience comes from.
"Twitonomy App is by far one of the most valuable Twitter analytics tool I've ever used. It gives you everything you need to analyze what is working and not working. It gives you everything from mentions, replies, lists, most influential users, and even the time that you get the most engagement. The best part is it allows you to pull all of the data and put it into visual graphs. It analyzes your followers as well so that you can use the data to increase engagement."
- Jack Kosakowski (@JackKosakowski1) - Social selling eBRANDgelist and Regional Sales Manager at @ActOnSoftware, Social Media Advisor for Chill Puck.com
Twitter Analytics - Simple and Precise
Twitter Analytics is Twitter's own analysis tool, and one of the best things about getting data from the social network that produces it is that you can be pretty sure that that data is going to be accurate. Twitter Analytics only lets you see data about profiles you own (so no competitive intelligence here) but the breakdown into month-by-month top line stats is a nice way to see exactly how you're performing over time. You can also click on the "Tweets" tab to get a more in-depth view of how individual tweets have performed.
"Being a writer who spends every waking moment flitting between writing, researching and tweeting it's great to have such an easy and accessible tool. With Twitter being my biggest outlet for sharing content, it's vital that I can see which posts are well-received and gain the most engagement so that I can more effectively alter my strategy regularly to meet the needs of my readers. With one click of a button you can see all the metrics you need which is worth its weight in gold."
- Kerry Butters (@kesbutters) - founder and CEO of markITwrite Digital and a prolific tech and digital marketing writer and influencer
"Twitter Analytics gives you fantastic insight into your audience and the content they value most. It provides data on clicks, engagement, impressions and also offers demographic and interest data on your followers so you can get an excellent snapshot of who is connecting with you or your brand."
- Laura Click (@lauraclick) - Founder & CEO of Blue Kite Marketing
MentionMapp - A Tool with a View
MentionMapp provides a different, more visual form of analysis compared to the other tools mentioned. Although there are some numbers available, the real benefit is in being able to see both who is interacting with your tweets and then, most interestingly, who is interacting with the tweets of your top influencers. The effect is to create a kind of influence map of both your own Twitter feed and those that you interact with, which can be a great way of working out how to make the maximum impact with your Twitter activity. You can look at the activity around any Twitter feed so you can get a feel for the activity surrounding your competitors as well.
"Mentionmapp is an excellent network exploring tool to see how people are interacting and what hashtags they are using. Once logged you can search for a specific Twitter user and then you will see a highlighted map that shows a web on who they are engaging with and what hashtags they are using. This tool is a great asset when you want to find and follow social influencers in a specific industry. It can help you find a community around your product or service."
- Shane Barker (@shane_barker) - Digital Strategist and Social Media Consultant, shanebarker.com
Talkwalker - New Features
We don't usually include ourselves in these lists but this time we received a comment about us from one of our influencers that we thought we'd share. Talkwalker is primarily a paid enterprise social listening platform, but we do also have a free version. We won't talk too much about our tool here but as a heads up we've recently introduced a new geolocation feature that's available on both our free search and our paid platform if you want to give it a try.
"I've only recently started using Talkwalker but I've been impressed thus far. Talkwalker gives you a lot of features for a free tool (Note: Talkwalker is primarily a paid tool that has a free test version) and I love that you can look at different metrics such as sentiment, demographics, performance etc. I'll be using the tool for researching other users as well as keeping an eye on my own Twitter account. I really like the visual layout as it provides a quick and easy way to check out various metrics without the need for working with complex data."
- Kerry Butters (@kesbutters) - founder and CEO of markITwrite Digital and a prolific tech and digital marketing writer and influencer
Foller.me - Text Please
Foller.me is a handy analytics tool, particularly for those who work better with numbers and text rather than graphs or charts. Rather than the bar, line and pie charts that accompany most Twitter analytics tools, foller.me is more text based, with averages and statistics written out rather than visually represented. Like Twitonomy, it also lets you analyze the Twitter activity of any account, not just those you own making it a handy tool for competitive intelligence.
"Foller.me is an exciting tool that will review a Twitter users profile and latest tweets and put them in "tag clouds" so you review and see which are most popular. This extremely helpful when you are looking to grow your community and you want to find the influencers that might like your products or services. You can then engage and start a conversation know what that influencers like to talk about and when to engage them."
- Shane Barker (@shane_barker) - Digital Strategist and Social Media Consultant, shanebarker.com
Twitter is a valuable resource for all marketers and the data available can help you understand the impact that your Twitter activity is having. Using these Twitter analytics tools you can make sure you're never out of the loop.