When looking at social media analytics, oftentimes Facebook steals the limelight for businesses. But something new is in town and it comes from Twitter. On April 22, Twitter rolled out a new look to all of its users. Last month (in August 2014), Twitter made their analytics platform – which was previously only accessible to their advertisers – available to everyone. And it is pretty cool.

Accessing Twitter Analytics

If you have a Twitter account, the analytics engine is already at work for you. To see the dashboard, simply navigate to http://analytics.twitter.com. If you are already logged in to Twitter, your dashboard will appear. If not or you want to login under a different account, it will prompt you.

Basic Twitter Analytics

You will be very happy with their dashboard. I think that they are among the most cleanly designed and intuitive ones in the industry. The front page shows you some very general statistics. First, you will see how many impressions you have earned in the four weeks and how it compares to the previous four weeks. It gives you an idea of how many people are seeing your tweets and if you are improving.

Next it will show you a graphic view of your impressions over the past four weeks by day. You can easily see which days are your strong ones and which are poorly performing. Next to the graph, Twitter tells you how you are doing today (as compared to your 28-day average).

Twitter Engagement Statistics

Twitter also takes you through your engagements on the front page of its analytics dashboard. You can see a historical view of an overall engagement rate, clicks on links, retweets, favorites and even replies. Each of these stats comes with a historic record, a look at that day’s performance and a comparison to the previous 28-day period.

Individual Tweet Statistics

Finally, the front page of the dashboard breaks down your individual tweets and shows you their performance. It shows you the impressions, or how many people have seen the tweet; the number of engagements, or clicks, retweets, replies and favorites; and the engagement with a computation of these two numbers.

Twitter Follower Analytics

Twitter also allows you to look at your followers. To access these statistics, find the “Followers” button on the top of the screen and click on it. This page is filled with some great stats and demographics about your audience, including…

• A historical look at your follower growth
• The location of your audience including top cities
• The gender make-up of your audience
• A look at your audience’s interests (the most unique ones and the top interests)
• Who else your audience follows

Finally, Twitter also lets you look at the performance of your Twitter Cards. We are going to postpone of our conversation of Twitter Cards today and talk about what a card is and how to measure their performance at a future date.

Twitter is one of the most evolving social platforms. It is one of my favorites and one that is truly changing with the social media movement. This new analytics platform can help you grow your audience and increase your engagement by looking at your previous successes. Learn from what went well and what didn’t. Replicate and expand upon what worked well. Understanding your analytics will help you grow.