Top 10 Twitter Metrics Marketers Need to Track in 2022 | Socialinsider

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Having started as a micro-blogging platform more than 15 years ago, Twitter is now one of the most popular social media advertising platforms and the 6th-ranked mobile app worldwide.

Twitter is a channel that shouldn’t miss from any business’ marketing strategy because it serves multiple purposes: apart from sharing news and connecting with your audience, it can also help with networking and raising brand awareness.

However, every marketer knows that just having a Twitter presence isn’t enough.

To achieve your social media goals, you need to understand Twitter metrics and make sense of your analytics.

But once you get started with Twitter analytics, you’ll get hit by a wave of analytics data. This is why we’re here to help you make sense of the most important Twitter metrics to track.

In this article, we’ll go over the Twitter performance metrics that are essential to measuring to ensure the success of your social media marketing strategy.

The first question you should ask yourself when analyzing your Twitter metrics should be, “What are my top Tweets?”

The top Tweets are your most performing Tweets (in terms of engagements or impressions) over a selected period.

Knowing what your top Tweets are is a great starting point for your Twitter analytics process because it can give you a sense of what your audience wants to see and engage with.

If you analyze your top Tweets for an extended time - at least a couple of months - you’ll be able to observe trends and patterns among your audience that you can use to maximize your content strategy.

To access your top Tweets, open your Twitter analytics dashboard from the native app, and your Top Tweet by impressions over the last 28 days will be displayed on the home page.

In Socialinsider, your top three Tweets by engagement can be found in your Twitter Overview dashboard, and you can customize the period you want to observe.

Besides keeping track of your top Tweets, you should consider looking at your top mentions.

This Twitter metric will tell you the most performing Tweets that mentioned you over a selected period.

Because Twitter is a networking platform, you should engage with your top mentions, no matter if they’re positive or negative.

Every mention of your brand increases your visibility and gets you in front of that account’s audience, which can only benefit you.

The Twitter top mentions metrics can be found next to your top Tweets in the native app’s analytics dashboard over the last 28 days.

But suppose you want to track your top mentions over an extended period of time sorted by the follower count of the mentioning profile.

In that case, you should consider an analytics tool like Socialinsider.

Twitter impressions represent the number of times your Tweets have been organically seen by someone over a reporting period.

This metric is non-unique, which means that a user can see your Tweet more than once and that Tweet will accumulate the impressions, despite them being from the same person.

Another aspect worth mentioning about this Twitter metric is that just because your Tweet has been displayed on someone’s feed, it doesn’t necessarily imply that they actually read it.

While Twitter impressions can be deceiving, they can also give you an overview of your brand reputation. For example, this metric can tell you how popular a Tweet has the potential to be.

Impressions can be tracked individually (for every Tweet) or at the overall account level.

To measure the individual Tweet stats, you need to go to that specific Tweet and open up the analytics button found at the bottom of the post.

To measure the overall account impressions, you simply need to open up your analytics dashboard from the native app, and the stats will be displayed at the top of the page.

However, with Socialinsider, you have access to even more impression metrics, such as engagement rate impressions or engagement rate impressions per post.

Engagement is an overview metric that can be measured at both the Tweet level or the total activity level of all Tweets over a given period.

According to Twitter, engagements measure the total number of interactions a user had with a Tweet.

This encompasses several ways someone could interact with a Tweet, including clicks anywhere on the Tweet, Retweets, replies, follows, likes, links, Tweet expansion, and more.

The engagement metric is one of the most popular social media metrics out there because it’s a good indicator of how likable your brand is by your audience. It’s often used to analyze goals related to brand and community engagement.

Due to the lack of reach, Twitter calculates the engagement rate by impressions: the number of engagements divided by impressions.

But you can also calculate the average engagement rate per Tweet by followers on Twitter, depending on your social media goals. Here’s the formula:

A high engagement rate means your audience found your Tweet interesting, as it made them interact with it in some way.

Follower metrics are usually vanity metrics and shouldn’t be your main focus when creating your Twitter marketing strategy.

Of course, every business dreams of a big audience, but many followers don’t necessarily translate into how successful the page is.

A massive Twitter following isn’t that valuable if it doesn’t engage with your posts, as we demonstrated earlier when we explained essential Twitter engagement metrics.

However, keeping track of your followers is still a good indicator of how your brand is perceived.  

Here’s what you should consider when analyzing the performance of your Twitter followers:

The new follower metric is pretty self-explanatory. It refers to the number of Twitter followers you gained over a certain period.

This metric will tell you that the audiences find your Twitter profile interesting enough to follow it and watch your content regularly.

Such metrics should be analyzed if your marketing goals are to increase brand awareness and grow your audience.

Another important follower metric we suggest you keep an eye on is the top follower one.

As its name suggests, your top follower is the Twitter account with the most significant number of followers that followed your profile in that month.

Just like your top Tweets or top mentions, this stat can only be broken down by month, so if this falls in line with your social media goals, you should keep a monthly track of your top followers.

This Twitter metric is a gold mine for potential influencer marketing. Through your top follower, you get to assess your reach, and if the follower is suitable for your business, you can consider them for future influencer campaigns.

You can identify this metric on your Twitter Dashboard’s home page.

The followers’ growth Twitter metric is the number of followers that have changed over the last 30 days.

Similarly to your new followers, this metric should be analyzed if you want to increase the awareness of your brand and grow your following base.

If the number is positive, it means you’re on a good path, and your audiences are interested in your Twitter content.

On the contrary, if the number decreases, you should investigate the matter and see what causes it.

Potentially, constantly engaging with your followers by replying, retweeting, and following back is the sure way to create a loyal fan base.

With Socialinsider, this metric is displayed more complex and descriptively than it would in the native app.

You can observe how your followers came and went with the help of a graph, and you can also see the number expressed as a percentage.

As the metric's name suggests, link clicks measure the number of times a person clicks on a link inside your post.

Why track this Twitter metric, you may wonder?

Because it will give you an idea of how your posts are performing so you can adjust your content strategy according to your followers' preferences.

You can take a look at this metric in your Twitter Analytics dashboard by clicking on "Tweets" at the top of the page. The stats will be displayed in the right column of the page, among other metrics.

However, with Socialinsider, you'll have access to more insights, such as the total clicks, the organic clicks, and the paid clicks, all displayed over a graph.

This overview Twitter metric shows how many times someone visited your Twitter profile by clicking on your account’s name, username, or profile picture.

Having a high number of profile clicks can be assuring, as it means that your audience is interested in knowing more about your business and the content you share on Twitter.

It’s simple math. If someone clicks on your profile and likes what they see, they will most likely become a new follower and, why not, a potential customer.

In your Twitter Analytics dashboard, you can analyze this metric at a Tweet level (if you click on an individual post’s activity) or as a total amount on the homepage.

In Socialinsider, this metric is displayed in your Twitter profile overview over a graph that shows both organic clicks and paid clicks on top of the total user profile clicks.

If you want to know how effective your Tweets are at driving traffic to your website, the most suitable Twitter metric to give you the answer is the Click-Through Rate, also known as CTR.

CTR is calculated as link clicks divided by impressions and is expressed as a percentage.

The higher the CTR, the more revenue, more sales, and more conversions you’ll probably get from your Twitter account.

However, as demonstrated earlier, there are many places someone can click on, including hashtags, mentions, links, username, picture, the white space to extend the tweet, etc.

So if your goal is to increase your CTR on Twitter, you should consider these metrics as well.

Another thing to keep in mind when looking at your Twitter CTR is that this metric is usually divided by reach on other social media platforms, so it can be tricky when benchmarking CTR cross-channel.

If, until now, we've only talked about metrics related to organic content, it's time to take a look at a metric that can give you insights into Twitter advertising.

The best Twitter metric to measure your campaign success when setting up a Twitter advertising campaign is called Cost Per Results, also known as CPR.

CPR is an overview metric that it's a bit more telling than engagements or impressions.

It's calculated as the average cost of each relevant action that a user takes on one of your Twitter ads.

By running Twitter ads, you can reach your marketing and business goals quicker, and with the help of the CPR metric, you'll know which campaign is cost-effective.

If you discover that the CPR is higher than it should be in your Twitter ad campaign, then you'll probably need to make some adjustments.

Last but not least, just like any other social media platform out there, Twitter provides a ton of metrics related to users’ demographics.

These are known as “audience insights” and can be found within the native app.

Why look into this Twitter metric?

Because it will give you good insights into who is engaging with your content that can be put to use for designing Twitter campaigns.

You can also use this information to compare your audience with your desired customer segments to decide if you’re addressing your Twitter content to the right people.

There you have it! A comprehensive list of Twitter metrics that will help orient you in the Twitter analytics landscape.

We included the most important Twitter metrics to track and explained how to calculate them and where you can find them.

Still, there are always more to include, especially if you’re a heavy user of Twitter advertising.

You should know by now that using Twitter as part of your social media strategy offers many business benefits, so if you need a helping hand, you can start a 14-Days free trial with Socialinsider and analyze your Twitter channel.