To find out how well your business is doing on Twitter, measurement is key in revealing which campaigns were successful and which fell short. Metrics can be used to measure the response, engagement and effectiveness of your Twitter campaigns and to detail the impact of your Twitter conversations. Measurement is important to ensure that your efforts are taking you in the right direction. Below is a breakdown of some important Twitter metrics to better understand your Twitter presence.

• Follower count refers to the number of people following you on Twitter
• A mention is any Twitter update that contains “@username” anywhere in the body of the Tweet.
• A retweet is a reposting of someone else’s Tweet
• Impressions measures your potential reach and is the number of times your message could have been seen, based on the follower count of those talking about you.

Follower count

This is the only metric published for all to see. A large number of followers suggest strong customer awareness and brand recognition. Therefore the higher this number is the better right? Wrong. Lets take two companies for this example we will call them Company X and Company Y. Company X has 1 million followers and company Y has 500,000 followers. This suggests that Company X is twice as successful as Company Y is on Twitter, however this is not in fact the case. There is no point having all those followers if they are not being engaged with.  Yes it’s important to have followers but you may only be ‘reaching’ 10% of these followers. Its better to have a smaller amount of actual followers that engage with your tweets on a regular basis than a large number of followers who never engage at all. In fact, nowadays some companies have a number of ‘followers’ who aren’t even real people. Tools are now available whereby companies can ‘purchase’ followers. Yes their numbers will go up but so will the % of non engagement between the company and their followers.  In terms of a follower ratio, it is always better to be followed by more than the amount of users you follow.

Mentions and Retweets

The main purpose of being on Twitter is to interact with the public which will hopefully in turn lead to sales, greater customer awareness and brand loyalty. Mentions and retweets are vital for a business to succeed on Twitter. It shows that your followers want to engage with the brand and are passionate enough to spread what you’re saying to their own online community by retweeting a message made by you. Nowadays word of mouth marketing is more important than ever so this shows the importance of retweets. A retweet also widens your reach. The greater number of followers the user retweeting the brands statement/ mentioning the brand in a tweet has the better as the audience will be wider. This is why some companies try and get celebrities interacting with them on Twitter.

Impressions

Impressions measures your potential reach and is the number of times your message could have been seen, based on the follower count of those talking about you. Potential Reach sums a user’s follower count and the sum of followers for any user retweeting any of their Tweets during the previous seven days to estimate the total potential reach in Twitter at any given time. Advantages are that it helps when measuring brand awareness. Disadvantages are that whilst you may have reached 100,000 people, only 10% may have actually read the message. You will never know the exact amount of people who actually read the message.

URL Links

You can track the number of clicks you receive on particular links you share on your Twitter page and by analyzing the links, you can look for consistencies for what is being shared and commented on. That will tell you the type of tweets that get the public engaging with your brand the most.

By David Nulty

The above blog is one of a series of digital marketing and social media metrics blogs that can all be found in our upcoming Marketing Metrics eBook. To sign up for this eBook, please fill in the following form below.