When developing a comprehensive social media strategy, coming up with posting themes and a social media calendar is just half of the work. The other critical piece of a social media strategy is to track your social media successes once your social media plan has launched. It's one thing to develop a strategy but social media management is a whole different animal.
Not only do you need to know what metrics to track, but also what each of these metrics actually tell you. The metrics for each social media platform are different, but they all tell you basically the same thing - the size and engagement of your audience. Here, I will highlight the metrics which are important to track for Twitter, and what these metrics actually tell you.
In order to track you or your company's Twitter metrics, you may consider using a chart like the one on the right in Excel or Google Spreadsheets, which highlights each of the important Twitter metrics including:
- Followers: the number of Twitter users following your Twitter profile & tweets
- Tweets: the number of Twitter posts you have sent out since day 1
- Replies: the amount of Twitter users who have replied to your tweets
- Retweets: the number of times Twitter users have reposted your tweets. This is usually indicated by having "RT" accompanied by "@__yourtwitterhandle__" at the beginning of a tweet
- Mentions: the amount of times Twitter users have @ mentioned you in their tweets
- Favorites: the number of times Twitter users have favorited your tweets by clicking the star
- Links: the number of links you posted (this is not an extremely important metric)
- Clicks: the number of clicks your links received overall
After you have collected these metrics, you may use some of them to calculate a few other metrics which will tell you the precise effectiveness of your Twitter campaign.
Some free tools which you may use to gauge your Twitter metrics are:
- Twitter analytics
- Twitonomy
- TweetStats
- Riffle (Google Chrome extension)
- Tweet Binder
- Klear
- Hootsuite analytics
I hope these tips on Twitter metrics have helped you! Please comment on what your experience with using any of these free tools and/or tracking Twitter metrics are. Join the discussion and leave your comments below.
Lastly, please feel free to contact us directly. You can always send us a message via our contact form or email me directly at: shaina at wildstory dot com.
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Sources:
- Socialbakers, "Marketers Pick: The Best Metrics For Social Media Monitoring"
- Simply Measured, "Twitter Metrics Defined: Reach"
- Simply Measured
