How to Measure your Twitter Impact

By Mark Tillison
Posted on July 26, 2016

Twitter Marketing Tips

In this T-Time Show, we explain how to measure Twitter impact. Making sure that you’re focused on the important metrics of reach and engagement and using tools provided by Twitter and Google.

Resources Referenced in the Show

– The Twitter for Business Guide; a stack of tips, techniques, and advice that will help increase Twitter impact and save you some time doing it.

– Using Analytics Campaign Tags to correctly attribute and measure traffic from your Twitter efforts, whether they’re organic tweets or through Twitter Ads.

Which Twitter Metrics are Important

(00:17) When deciding which metrics should you use to measure Twitter impact, it is first important to understand that Twitter (and most Social Media activity) is “Top of Funnel” activity. This means that it is fairly early on in the engagement cycle with your audience. Its primary purpose is to build relationships and reputation with your target audience. So you can earn trust, create awareness and interest in your brand and your product or service.

Twitter isn’t really about direct action or achieving sales directly from tweets. Whilst that is a possibility for some brands, the conversion rates aren’t typically as high as Paid Search Marketing, for example. Take care that you’re using the right tool for the right job and that you’re realistic about your expectations.

The key metrics you should be aiming to maximise and to measure are Reach, Engagement and perhaps website traffic. You may also want to include a measurement of how many times Twitter traffic features in the multi-channel funnel using Google Analytics. This is essentially how many times Twitter traffic influences sales and leads generated on your website.

Using Twitter Analytics to Measure Twitter Impact and Success

(02:01) Using analytics.twitter.com, you can easily see how far your tweets have reached, how much engagement your tweets have created, how many followers you’ve gained and how many link clicks.

You can also use Twitter Analytics to compare different date ranges. Here you’ll see how well you’re doing and areas that you need to improve on.

Mark explains that the greatest engagement levels happen for him during Twitter Chats. These are regular, hosted networking events focused around a hashtag where users are far more intently engaged in conversations.

Using Google Analytics to measure Twitter Impact and Success

(09:00) Using analytics.google.com, you’ll be able to measure the volume of traffic and the behaviour of visitors to your site which originated from Twitter. Remember that this could be your own tweets, or someone else tweeting your content, of course.

Twitter traffic is reported in Google Analytics in the Source/Medium reports, sometimes as Twitter/Social and sometimes as t.co/Social. It’s also sometimes a variety of others too.

t.co is Twitter’s own URL shortener. Every link shared on Twitter, whether it is already shortened or not, will be shortened with a t.co link and redirected to the original link your shared.

If you want more detailed reporting in Google Analytics from your Twitter activity, you can also manually add your own Analytics Tags to URLs to specify additional data which you can later report on. See: Analytics Campaign tagging.

Also See

Using Brand Value Signals to Measure Your Marketing. This post explains how to measure the impact of Social Media and offline activity on website traffic, even when there isn’t a direct action from that activity. e.g. Twitter visibility and engagement creates searches for your brand on Google, but the two are not directly connected data points.Speak with a SpecialistOur Twitter Marketing Services