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All you need to know about the new Twitter Dashboard
Twitter has launched a new way to analyse the performance of tweets in real time – through the new and improved Tweet Activity Analytics Dashboard. Here’s all you need to know about the social networking advertiser’s new best friend…
As most marketing-savvy businesses know, Twitter isn’t just a platform for telling the world about your lunch or testing out your wittiest one-liners. It is a very valuable marketing tool, not only for reaching and interacting with customers but also for producing useful data to shape future campaigns.
The Twitter Analytics Dashboard – a new way to manage marketing campaigns
Tracking and analysing data on Twitter used to be quite a complicated and time-consuming business, a fact that has clearly been recognised by the folks at Twitter, who have announced the launch of a brand new Tweet Activity Analytics Dashboard. Twitter explains:
“Starting today, you’ll have a new tool in your arsenal: we’re rolling out an enhanced tweet activity dashboard to provide measurable insights into how your organic tweets perform,” Buster Benson, Twitter’s Analytics Product Manager explained.
What’s new?
The new and improved Twitter Dashboard, which will be available to Twitter card publishers, advertisers and other verified users, will enable users to:
- See how far their organic tweets have reached (in a set period of time)
- See how individual tweets perform in real time
- Measure how much Twitter users engage with and re-tweet individual posts
- Quickly check the total number of replies, re-tweets, follows, link clicks and favourites each tweet received
- Export data into a CSV file, a very handy feature which enables Analytics data to be used and integrated into existing marketing campaigns, as well as producing reports
- Compare impressions on different devices and platforms (i.e. iOS or Android apps, Twitter web etc.)
In addition, new features of the Dashboard include a brand new and rather great looking interface and the chance to analyse data for up to 3,200 tweets (the previous version only showed data for 500).
Using all of this insightful information, advertisers and other users will be able to more effectively optimise their content strategies. This enables future campaigns using the platform to be more effective, accurate and targeted, with a clear strategy in place that is proven (by the Analytics Dashboard date) to really work.
An early tester of the Dashboard, Simply Measure’s Adam Schoenfeld, said of the announcement:
“With social media maturing as a marketing channel, measurement is the top priority for brands looking to understand performance and scale investment. By allowing access to real impression data, Twitter is giving businesses a relevant benchmark to compare social marketing outcomes with other digital channels.”
Get help with the new Twitter Dashboard…from Twitter!
The new Tweet Activity Anayltics tool isn’t just useful for advertisers wanting to collect and analyse data about their own activities on the platform. Twitter has its own analytics team using the same kind of tools, and they have analysed activities from around 200 active brand advertisers from SMBs and Fortune 500 companies. Using this data, Twitter has come up with some very useful pointers on how often to tweet and importantly – what kind of thing to post in order to pull in the biggest audience. As a general rule, regular tweets along with engaging content is the best recipe, one which could boost organic reach to around five times your follower base.
Top tips for using the Dashboard and improving the reach of your tweets include:
- Pay close attention to the time of day you tweet. How effective are certain tweets at different times of the day and the week, and what about big news events and holidays? Are some tweets performing better at different times, with increased impressions and engagement than those posted at other times?
- Rethink the frequency of your tweets. This is something that needs careful tweaking to ensure that it’s just right, so you’ll need to look at the data and decide – just how many tweets is too many?
- Analyse tone. Using data on which tweets have the greatest reach and interaction from users, you can work out the best Twitter tone for your brand.
- Stop using tweet mechanics (i.e. calls to action) that aren’t working. If your strategy isn’t working, it isn’t too late to change it – this is what the data produced by the Dashboard is useful for.
For more information on best practice, the latest news and developments or help with making the most of the new Twitter Dashboard, go to the Twitter Media Blog.
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