Twitter Analytics is a feature on Twitter that provides businesses with the ability to measure post results, boost target-marketing campaigns, and evaluate the impact each posts has on its audiences. Anyone with a Twitter account can access and utilize Analytics, however, this feature is especially helpful for businesses and influencers with the goal of increasing engagement, tracking the influence of posts, and building relationships with target audiences. Twitter Analytics provides users with a summary of the number of tweets posted, number of profile visits, impressions tweets have received, follower count, and the number of mentions, replies and retweets.

Twitter Analytics offers three dashboards to optimize results: tweet activity, followers and twitter cards. In order to maximize the benefits and effectively track metrics, it is important for Analytics users to familiarize themselves with ins and outs of the dashboards and the vocabulary used:

• Tweet activity: This is the main portal to measure engagement with your followers. Analyzing the type of tweets that were successful and content that was unsuccessful will help to improve future posts and goal setting for campaigns. Measuring these results will help businesses and influencers edit strategies to align with what brought the best results, aka the types of posts their following prefers. A helpful feature with tracking engagement is the ability to break down each post: How many link clinks resulted? Who clicked on the link? Who didn’t? Was this post retweeted? Why or why not?
• Followers: This dashboard provides the ultimate view into your audience. Tweet activity and the success of posts relies heavily on content, however, “great” content to one demographic or target audience may not be considered “great” content to another viewer. Understanding who your audience is will help target campaigns and understand where to invest resources. The followers and audience portal will give insight into the interests, location and demographics of your following.
• Twitter Cards: These “cards” are essentially enhanced tweets that allow you to include images, video, audio and downloadable links to each 140-character tweet. After analyzing the data from your tweet activity and followers, you will know if twitter cards are right for you based on your followings’ engagement with visuals and audio content. Twitter cards increase engagement from tweets, drive application downloads, and provide another way to measure results through link clicks, image downloads, app install attempts and retweets. To view the different types of cards available and to understand which is best for your industry and audience, visit Twitter’s developer site.

Another helpful aspect of Twitter is the Quick Promote tool. The ability to transfer successful content into an advertisement, without leaving the app, has become an attractive and necessary offering by social media accounts within the last few years. Instagram Business profiles launched a similar feature, enabling business accounts to transform successful posts into ads by the click of a button. The ease and ability to do this helps expand the reach of a post that has already been tested and proved as successful by the original followers who likely make up the target demographic. This feature saves resources, preventing advertising and marketing teams from having to recreate ads and duplicate design efforts.

Altogether, implementing Twitter Analytics helps marketing teams develop and maintain a strategic approach to performing social efforts and setting and achieving goals. Taking the time to understand your audience, study, and invest in the types of content that resonates best with them will provide businesses with a loyal following, not to mention that followers will turn to the business account for news, entertainment, advice and resources (depending on the industry). Twitter Analytics provides users with transparency throughout each step of the campaign; tracking these metrics and comparing results overtime will help perfect strategy for developing future social media campaigns.

Businesses who’ve built relationships with their followers and understand the types of posts they prefer to interact with will have a better grasp of toward where they should dedicate dollars and if Twitter is even the right platform for relationship building with their target audiences.