Introducing organic Tweet analytics

Friday, 11 July 2014

Twitter Ads can help you amplify your messages and offerings — and we see that the most successful advertisers are those who first establish a strong organic presence on Twitter. After all, Promoted Tweets are simply organic Tweets that are targeted to a specific audience.

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.

For the first time, advertisers will be able to see how many times users have viewed and engaged with organic Tweets, so that they can more effectively optimize their content strategy. The Tweet activity dashboard is now available to all advertisers, Twitter Card publishers, and verified users around the world.

With the new dashboard, you can:

  • See how your Tweets are performing in real time.
  • Compare impressions (times a Tweet is viewed by anyone on Twitter web and Android or iOS apps, including logged-out users), total engagements and Retweets month over month.
  • Use the Tweet details page to see how many Retweets, replies, favorites, follows, link clicks and embedded media clicks each Tweet received.
  • Export your Tweet performance metrics into a CSV file, which now includes both organic and promoted data.

Introducing organic Tweet analytics

New insights from additional research

On Twitter, nothing comes between your Tweets and your followers. The Tweet activity dashboard can help you create content that resonates most with these followers, who have the ability to amplify your brand’s message even further through actions like a Retweet, mention or reply.

In addition to the data included in the new Tweet activity dashboard, which focuses on impressions and total engagements, we recently analyzed organic Tweets and the reach of those Tweets (reach = unique logged-in users served one or more impressions) for 200 active brand advertisers. The data below identifies a few insights and best practices for brands when developing their own content strategy on Twitter. These advertisers spanned multiple verticals and ranged from Fortune 500 companies to SMBs.

First, we saw that brands that tweet two to three times per day can typically reach an audience size that’s equal to 30% of their follower base during a given week. This indicates that Tweet consistency is a key factor when it comes to maximizing your organic reach on Twitter.

When brands pair consistent tweeting with engaging content, there’s potential for even higher organic reach. In fact, Wheat Thins (@WheatThins) achieved organic reach equal to 95% of their follower base by tweeting 2x a day per week, while Trident (@TridentGum) saw organic reach that was 5x greater than their follower base by tweeting 3x per day.

“It’s incredibly powerful for our brands to gain insights into their organic impressions on Twitter. We gain a massive amount of value in understanding how our Tweets resonate with our followers,” said Bonin Bough, VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Mondelēz International. “There’s no filter between our brands and our followers on Twitter, and this new dashboard shines a light on how our brand’s voice helps drive our organic activity. In turn, this will help influence how we can be smarter around our decisions related to paid campaigns.”

Of the 200 brands, those that drove the highest organic reach utilized one or more of these tactics when it was relevant to their marketing goals:

  • Leverage real-time cultural moments like live sports events, awards shows or trending conversations.
  • Mention influencer usernames with large followings or high-volume hashtags in Tweets.
  • Include auto-expanded photos or videos paired with short, conversational copy.

Tweet activity dashboard best practices

The revamped Tweet activity dashboard can help you quickly identify which Tweets drive the highest engagement and impressions. Here are a few ways to use the dashboard to improve your content strategy today:

  • Pay attention to when you tweet. Note which time of day and day of the week yields the highest engagement and impressions.
  • Analyze the frequency of your Tweets. Use your new insights to determine your Tweet cadence.
  • Identify what Tweet mechanics work, and which aren’t as effective. Keep an eye on elements like different calls to action, the inclusion of rich media and copy length.

Our goal is to provide the insights you need to maximize your business presence on Twitter. Get started with the new Tweet activity dashboard — and if you’re not yet advertising on Twitter, sign up today.

All images used with permission of @Buzzfeed.