Have you discovered Twitter Analytics yet?

You may not be aware but Twitter offers its users a wealth of tweet data and it’s completely free!

Twitter analytics is available via desktop – which gives the most detailed information, and via smartphone – although the information available on smartphones is more limited.

Twitter analytics on a desktop gives you an overview of the last 28 days of your account offering information on your top tweet, top mention, top follower and top media tweet and more. Click on a specific tweet using the ‘View Tweet activity’ button and you get even more granular data [see photo 1 below] like follows, retweets, profile views, link clicks, replies and more.

Photo 1

If you click the ‘Audiences’ tab you can see your followers data including geographical location, interests, and gender – all of this info could be useful in creating more targeted tweets. The best thing is that if you’re viewing from the desktop version of Twitter analytics you can export this data as a .csv file for closer analysis from the ‘Tweets’ tab.

On a smartphone the tweet data is more limited but you can still see key information including Impressions, likes and engagement metrics.

How to get Twitter analytics?

If you’re using any of Twitter’s paid Ads service or taking advantage of their free Twitter Cards service then you’ll already have access to this but if not, all you’ve got to do is go to analytics.twitter.com and login with your Twitter username and password (your account has to be older than 2 weeks to sign up for this).

Twitter may suggest setting up paid Twitter Ads when you sign up but you don’t need to set these up to view your tweet data. It may take a few days for the data to appear so be patient and remember Twitter won’t have data on any tweets prior to you signing up, only those you publish once you’ve activated it.

Once activated, and you’ve tweeted, you can view your data, via your Twitter account, by going to your profile icon and from the dropdown menu selecting ‘Analytics’ (desktop Twitter) [see photo 2 below] or by the small ‘bar chart’ graphic visible to the right of all your tweets (smartphone Twitter app). [see photo 3 below]

Photo 2

Photo 3

So there you have it a quick introduction into Twitters’ free analytics. It’s a great, if under used resource and with a bit of analysis can be really helpful in understanding what tweets are popular, to who, why and help you improve your Twitter conversations.