Marketers love metrics because it allows us to do multiple things: better understand our audience and measure the success of our efforts. This is reflected in the tools that digital marketers use, such as Google Analytics, SEO tracking tools, social media monitoring platforms and so on. Social media sites have wised up to benefits of providing metrics for marketing and have started integrating them directly into their platforms. One of the first to provide this feature was Facebook. Twitter is the latest social platform to join the movement as they now offer Analytics within Twitter itself. Let’s review what data is provided and a noticeable weakness of this tool.

Data Within Twitter Analytics

In order to access Twitter Analytics, you must sign into your Twitter account on the Advertising page. From there you will click Analytics in the top left corner of the site and choose the data that you’d like to see in the drop down, which is broken into two categories: Timeline Activity and Followers.

• Timeline Activity:

  This section shows you activity on your account, including mentions, follows and unfollows, over the past month in the form of a timeline. A list of your tweets will also be displayed on this page, showing the number of favorites, retweets and replies for each tweet. This list may be sorted by best, good, or all, which allows you to identify the types of content that resonate most with your followers in order to tweet that content more often.

• Followers:

  As the name would suggest, this page breaks down data about your followers, including their gender, location, interests and other Twitter users that your followers also follow. In addition, you will see a chart depicting your follower growth.

A Few Concerns

This data is undoubtedly useful for business owners who use Twitter to connect with their customers, but it makes us ask ourselves, does anyone tweet directly on Twitter anymore? Often programs like HootSuite make tweeting much easier and more time efficient, meaning that business owners rarely if ever log directly into their twitter accounts. Plus, these platforms already provide integrated analytics. If business owners are already using another social management and monitoring tool to review metrics on their Twitter accounts, will they consider abandoning these tools in favor of integrated Analytics since they aren’t already logging into their accounts? Check out the new Twitter Analytics for yourself and let us know what you think!