Social media has a special way of keeping your brand integrated into the everyday lives of your audience. Marketers call this engagement. Engagement is really good for increasing customer retention. Retention is the theory that customers will repurchase your product or service in the future because your brand is viewed as a good fit in the consumer’s everyday life.
If we agree that social media analytics (when unpaid) are really less about return on investment (ROI) and more about increasing followers and engagement/views of your content, we can agree on measuring it. Twitter gives a ton of tools for measuring the engagement level of your tweets. It is almost overwhelming. You will want to do the following after signing into your Twitter account and posting your content to measure:
- From the home screen, click on your account icon on the upper right of the screen.
- In the drop down menu, click on profile.
- On your profile page, scroll down to the post/tweet you would like measurements from and click this symbol:
Doing this will give you all of the most relevant engagement data for that specific tweet. Here is a sample tweet from my personal Twitter handle @AndrewPalios where I share content I came across on Facebook with my followers on Twitter:
When I click on the symbol as described above I come to the Tweet Activity screen:
The Tweet Activity screen will show you many different types of measurements depending on the nature of your tweet. Here is some insight into what the metrics mean. Keep in mind a unique user is defined as an individual user i.e. not a user that viewed the same content multiple times:
- Impressions
The amount of times this tweet was viewed in the feed of any unique user. - Total Engagements
The amount of times a unique user clicked on the tweet link, one of its hashtags, or expanded the details to view more of its content.- Link Clicks
Unique users that clicked the link in the tweet. - Hashtag Clicks
Unique users that clicked a hashtag in the tweet. - Detail Expands
Unique users that expanded the content of the tweet.
- Link Clicks
You will notice that Twitter actually rolls up link clicks, hashtag clicks, and detail expands into the Total Engagement metric. As you can see, Twitter puts a lot of value on engagements/views of tweets from users, and so should we.
Andrew M. Palios
IO Marketing
I cover design, marketing, communications, and technology to demonstrate the value of creativity.
IO Marketing 