Top 12 Twitter Metrics You Should Track

Twitter is the platform of choice for establishing branding, with more than 48% of marketers using the social media app to strengthen their online presence.

Depending on your business goals, Twitter can be different for every organization.

Twitter is a tool for building personal brands and helping businesses grow. But apart from marketing, networking and sharing news, people also go to Twitter for customer support.

To make the most of Twitter for your business, you need to know what metrics to track to meet your marketing objectives and strategy.

So, here is a comprehensive guide explaining the fundamental Twitter metrics and our tips on improving your overall Twitter strategy.

But first, where can you find your Twitter metrics?

What is Twitter analytics?

As long as you have a Twitter account over 14 days old, you can access a reporting dashboard that shows your Twitter data and analytics.

You can find it by signing into your account and heading to More > Analytics to turn it on.

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On the dashboard, you’ll see organic and promoted metrics such as follower growth, Tweet activity, engagement rates, Twitter Card data and more.

Though seeing all this data may be overwhelming at the beginning, there are 12 iomportant Twitter metrics you need to track closely.

The most important Twitter metrics to track

1. Top Tweet

The top Tweet metric is shown on your main analytics dashboard. It’s the best-performing Tweet of the month with the most impressions or engagements.

Clicking on “View Tweet activity” can let you see the engagement details, including expand, link clicks, profile clicks and more.

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Analyzing your top-performing Tweets is necessary as it lets you know what your followers like. Do they prefer Tweets with video content, or do Tweets with images perform better?

Tracking your top Tweets over an extended period will allow you to identify trends and patterns among your audience that you can use to maximize your tweeting strategy.

Not to mention, the top Tweet is also an excellent choice to boost if you run ads.

2. Top mention

Like the top Tweet, the top mention is displayed on your home dashboard, showing you the Tweet with the highest impressions mentioning your @handle.

Essentially, this metric is crucial for managing your brand reputation and replying to comments about your business or product, whether positive or negative.

But apart from addressing it, tracking the top-mentioned Tweets can let you gather insights and patterns of what most people agree about your business, product or service.

With this, you can create a post to address any popular questions or improve your product based on your feedback.

3. Impressions

Under the Tweets section, you can find the number of impressions for all of your Tweets.

This refers to the number of times other users have organically seen your post, which also considers views from retweets and quote tweets.

To gather insights, you can analyze this metric according to each Tweet performance or look at the cumulative impressions for the month.

For example, following up or repurposing Tweets with the most impressions.

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As Twitter users view their Tweets chronologically, tracking your impressions by the time of post can also help you understand when to post for the most reach and engagement.

4. Follower count

Though known as a vanity metric, this benchmark represents more than just the popularity of your company or brand.

The follower count metric shows the number of users following your account to regularly get your content in their feeds.

This is an essential metric to track as it shows if your Tweeting strategy offers your audience value.

For this metric, you want to track the new follower count per day to see if your growth is steady.

5. Top follower

The top follower metric lets you know the account with the highest follower count that followed your profile in the month.

Like top tweets and mentions, this insight goes by month., and you should keep track of it to incorporate it into your social media strategy.

Take advantage of this is as simple as reaching out, thanking the person for following and starting a conversation.

Knowing your top followers will allow you to network with them and widen your reach through collaboration or influencer campaigns.

6. Link clickthroughs

Link clickthroughs track the number of times users have clicked on your link to visit your web page from Twitter.

The best part of tracking this metric is that it lets you experiment with copywriting variants and ways to engage your followers.

From the descriptions on your profile to your paid ads, you can split test your ideas to see which works the best.

Your profile click is yet another essential metric to track if you want to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns on brand visibility.

It counts the number of times someone clicks on your account, username or profile photo — indicating that a new audience is interested in learning more about you.

7. Video views

For Twitter, a user is watching your video when it is unmuted or in 50% view for 2 seconds or more. These actions count as a video view.

This is an important metric to track if you use videos in your Tweets, as you should.

Videos are great hooks that can get people to take action. Twitter data has reported that Tweets with video show 10x more engagement than those without.

By measuring which videos are getting the most views, you’ll be able to refine your strategy to help produce the best video content that engages your audience.

8. Engagement

Having many followers is exciting, but the Twitter engagement metric tells you if your followers are engaging with your Tweets.

It refers to the number of interactions a user has made with a Tweet, from a media expansion, likes, retweets, replies, follow or click-through on a link or hashtag.

This metric shows how your audience responds to your content, what’s working and what’s not. You can know what content your audience finds truly valuable or useful.

Likewise, this metric can show you data for each independent Tweet or the total activity for all Tweets on your account, known as the engagement rate.

Engagement rate is the average number of engagements per impression. This metric gives a better picture of how a Tweet or general account performs.

It will tell you how effectively your Tweets engage your followers, which is the more accurate indicator of your Twitter marketing success.

9. Audience demographics

Known as audience insights on the Twitter platform, this metric offers insights into your audience demographic such as:

• Gender
• Location
• Language
• Device
• Interests

This demographic data can help you better define your customer persona, which will allow you to create content and personalize campaigns both on and off Twitter

10. Hashtag performance

Monitoring hashtag performance can give you the bigger picture of your Twitter campaigns and evaluate the engagement in a broader context.

This Twitter metric shows how frequently users use a specific hashtag in Tweets, allowing you to find your brand's most relevant, high-volume hashtags.

By pairing your hashtag performance with audience monitoring, you can know what keywords or Twitter hashtags will attract potential customers.

Plus, it’s also helpful for running a branded hashtag campaign, as you can use the metric to monitor how effective your branded campaign is.

11. Cost per result (CPR)

Cost per result (CPR) calculates the average cost for a relevant action each user takes on your ad, and is essential if you advertise on Twitter.

You can find the CPR metric in your Twitter Ads center per campaign.

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Though advertising costs can vary depending on your ad types, the CPR metric is an excellent guide to determine if your campaign is cost-effective.

Promoted tweets, for example, should cost between $0.50 to $2.00 for each action. If you have a high CPR, this would mean that your investment is probably not worthwhile.

Based on this metric, marketers can optimize their ads and know which performs better, like shorter or longer Tweets. Or boosting ads with low CPR to an even larger audience.

If you have a tracking pixel set up, the reports could also show total conversions and cost per conversion, which will help you identify if your generated leads are turning into sales.

Knowing how effective your ads are can help you better engage with customers and reach your marketing goals quicker.

12. Conversions

Conversion is the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy, and it should be no different for your Twitter marketing.

The conversion metric on Twitter analytics allows you to measure your return on ad spend by tracking how many people have taken the desired action after viewing your Tweets.

This can provide you with a better picture of your ROI. To retrieve this data, access your Twitter Analytics dashboard and hover over “More” to see “Conversion tracking".

Here, you can create your website tag and add it to your landing pages so that Twitter can track what your followers do after clicking on your links.

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There are two types of Twitter tags to set up: A universal website tag, and a single event tag to track the campaign.

It can be anything from installing an app to signing up for an account, and your conversion rate will tell you if you need to improve your landing page or Twitter ad.

Using this metric, you can calculate the cost per acquisition and the customer lifetime value.

Final thoughts

Twitter marketing starts with determining what metrics are essential to your business. By now, you should know what success on Twitter looks like.

It can be high engagement with followers retweeting and commenting or having your website link clicked on and transforming leads into customers. No matter what, it starts with setting goals and tracking the right Twitter metrics timely to analyze your performance.