It’s no secret that Twitter is one of the most powerful and influential social media platforms out there, but it’s surprising how many businesses are not leveraging the power of Twitter to grow their business. While each tweet may only be 140 characters, there is so much information to be had that can be leveraged for your business.

We all know that Twitter is a great way to share quick updates, content, engage with your customers and get access to news by the second, but the analytics and data available from Twitter may be the platform’s best feature. Most businesses are making the mistake of only focusing on simple metrics like followers and likes, but effectively using Twitter analytics tools, you can monitor your brand awareness, who is talking about your brand, what is happening with your competitors, and much more.

Now, this definitely is not to say that metrics like followers and likes are not important, of course they are. We just urge you to dive a bit deeper and doing so will likely help you understand why you’re gaining or losing followers or why your tweets are getting more retweets or likes.

There are three sides to the analytics that you should be monitoring from Twitter; internal analytics, ad analytics, and search analytics. Each has a very distinct role for your business and monitoring each is very important to your marketing success on Twitter. Let’s dive in, starting with the most common analytics, internal analytics.

Internal analytics

These are the most commonly followed and monitored analytics and include metrics such as followers, following, number of tweets, the number of lists that you’ve been added to and mentions of your handle, but that is where most marketers are stopping. There are so many more internal analytics that are important to your brand. Here are a couple of our favorites that you should be monitoring:

• Influencers

We expect influencer marketing to continue to grow throughout 2017 and beyond so understanding who your most influential followers are will give you the ability to start targeting them and hopefully establish a good relationship with them to help promote your brand. The way influence is measured is using the Klout Score. The Klout Score is a score between 1-100 representing each account’s influence, the higher the score the more influence that account has based on social media analytics. Right now, Klout measures influence from nine different social networks including the world’s most popular networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Continuing to monitor your most influential followers and your own Klout Score are very important to your marketing efforts and will only become more and more important throughout the coming year. As you can see below, we have one follower with a high Klout Score of 71. To put that into context, Justin Bieber has a Klout Score of 92, Zooey Deschanel has a score of 86. It would be in our best interest to continue to engage with Ann and work to build that relationship.

Looking to increase your Klout Score? It’s all based on your ability to influence decisions. This means you should be active on as many networks as possible, posting consistently, and getting engagement on your posts throughout all networks. Putting out great content consistently is the key to not only a higher Klout Score, but to a successful content marketing strategy on social media.

• Top Tweets

It is also important to understand your audience and what kinds of content is resonating with them most. Understanding this will help you to produce better and more interesting content that your followers can’t help but engage with. Engagement can come in several forms on Twitter including likes, retweets, replies. Replies and retweets are more beneficial for your business for obvious reasons, but understanding which tweets are getting the most overall engagement (total likes, retweets, and replies) will help you to understand what your followers are really interested in. Here is an example from Social Media Examiner’s content. As you can see, they’ve had a lot of success with some of these tweets, particularly their top tweet with 244 total engagements. Producing more content like these top posts will continue to engage their following while boosting their brand recognition and awareness. Now don’t be fooled, just because Social Media Examiner is a large content brand doesn’t mean that everything that they’ve produced has been a huge hit. They’ve had to monitor, measure, and understand these same metrics in order to help with their content creation process just like you’ll need to.

Ad Analytics

Social media is becoming more and more of a pay-to-play game. Twitter has not become as ad heavy as Facebook has, but we don’t expect it to take long for Twitter to be on that level. With about 317 million Twitter users as of the third quarter of 2016 according to Statista, the network is going to be forced to push more of a pay per click advertising model sooner rather than later. Twitter ads have been around since 2010 and are growing in popularity. In fact, CNBC reported that Twitter ad revenue grew 6% last quarter. We expect to see ad prices decrease and popularity to continue to grow. As many businesses are finding out, staying in front of your followers on Twitter can prove to be very difficult due to the ever updating system that Twitter employs. Each tweet only has a shelf life of about sixty minutes. Nothing really sticks around long unless it’s engaged with at a high rate. We expect Twitter ads will become almost mandatory sooner rather than later similar to Facebook Ads.

Now, once you’ve taken the plunge and start advertising with Twitter, it’s important to monitor and optimize based on your analytics to get your costs as low as possible while reaching as many people in your target market as possible. Here are some important metrics to understand and measure:

• CPM

CPM stands for cost per 1,000 impressions. This is the average cost that you’re paying to reach 1,000 impressions. It’s important to note and understand that an impression is NOT necessarily a unique user. This does not mean that this is your average cost to reach 1,000 people, but simply that your ad has been viewed 1,000 times. The average CPM on Twitter is about $9 – $11. It can obviously be lower depending on targeting and optimization. It is a process and monitoring your CPM closely will make it possible for you to continue to get lower and lower costs.

• CPF

Your CPF is the average cost that you are paying per new follower. If the objective of your ad is to gain Twitter followers then you will want to monitor your CPF closely. On average, the cost per follower from a Twitter ad is between $2.50 – $3.50. Managing and measuring your result may give you the ability to lower your bid and still maintain the rate of new followers from your ads that you’d like.

Search Analytics

The final type of analytics that you should be monitoring that we’re going to touch on is search analytics. Twitter is a very large search engine and there is a lot that you can monitor for your brand and your competitors through the use of Twitter analytics tools. Here are some of our favorites that you should be monitoring:

• Mentions of Competitors

Every business has competition, whether it’s a very obvious competitor (ex. T-Mobile and Verizon) or something more indirect, we’ve got competition. Monitoring what your competitors are doing and who is talking about them is important. Setting up tracking to monitor your competitors’ tweets as well as a search widget to monitor any time someone mentions their handle or their business name can help you learn who may be looking for an alternative to them, what they’re doing right, and how you can capitalize on it. Nothing is private anymore so we encourage you to use the tools at your disposal to learn from your competitors’ successes and failures.

• Keyword & Hashtag Monitoring

Inevitably there are going to be people out there that need what your business does, but that don’t currently do business with you or maybe they don’t even know your business exists. Monitoring keywords and hashtags that can signal someone that may be in need of your services can be a great way to introduce your company and earn new customers from Twitter. We recommend focusing on keywords and phrases that someone may tweet about with a problem that your business solves. For example, if you’re a business that sells products to help athlete recover from muscle and joint injuries, monitoring keywords like sprain, strain, muscle pull, pulled muscle, and even more specific keyword phrases like pulled hamstring can shed light on people in the Twitterverse that are in need of what your business offers.

Now that you see that there is more to Twitter than just 140 characters and followers you can start to make Twitter work to help actually grow your business! Start implementing these Twitter analytics tools today and monitor them every day!

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