You Ask, I Answer: Twitter Performance Report Metrics?

In today's episode, David asks, I'm working on a Twitter performance report. I'm trying to determine the best metric for demonstrating our performance, assuming the thing that matters for the moment is engagement and not necessarily conversions. My feeling is that engagement rate could potentially be the most valuable, albeit imperfect metrics, since absolute numbers like retweets, likes, and replies can fluctuate based on how many times we tweet in a given month, plus general seasonality. Is that a fair assumption? What KPIs do you use?

Thanks in advance. Okay. Conversions do matter. Um you're going to find that the report is of a lot less interest to people if it does not talk about how you're helping support the business. So let's get that out of the way first.

Your report has to address conversions. If it doesn't, it will be you will be asked to at some point. Take care of that up front. When it comes to social media platforms, the metrics from the platform tell you what you're doing right or wrong on that platform, right? They tell you this tweet worked, that tweet did not work, or uh this many people um start following you because of that tweet.

Social media platforms rarely ever tell you uh what that platform's impact is to your business. The exception to that rule is uh Facebook's analytics, and don't particularly like or trust those. Um you're going to want to look at this social media platform's impact on the rest of your business through a tool like Google Analytics. Now, should you keep looking at in this case Twitter analytics and diagnosing what's working and what's not? Absolutely.

But for the impact side, you're gonna want to look at Google Analytics. You're gonna want to look at your marketing automation system. You're gonna want to see what happened uh after somebody engaged with your tweets and stopped by your website and maybe did something of value. So conversions absolutely matter. All that has to come through Google Analytics to start with.

So make sure you've got it set up correctly, that you've got Twitter identified as social media, that you're not dropping attribution. Make sure that you're doing things like using UTM tracking codes on links that you share on Twitter to your website. So that again, you can properly attribute any of the activity data you see in Google Analytics back to Twitter. So what metrics should you be looking at? Well, think about the marketing operations funnel.

Awareness, engagement, the conversion, and conversion. Conversion, remember that conversion does not need to be, hey, I bought something right now, right? Especially for B2B. It's rarely going to happen that somebody's going to buy an expensive service. A conversion could be a lead generated.

A conversion could be a shopping cart started, right? A conversion can be someone signing up for your email newsletter and giving you the ability to reliably reach them. So all of those things I think are valuable and vital conversions. Program those into Google Analytics, make sure it's tracking them, and then you can start to see Twitter's real impact. The impact of Twitter would be just the top line metrics from the platform, as you outlined, uh your addressable audience that you reached, uh, the engagement on Twitter, and then new users to your website from Twitter.

How is Twitter doing at generating new audience, giving you the ability to reach out and bring people in to your conversion engine, right? Your website. If that number is zero, then Twitter is definitely not having an impact on your business beyond maybe brand awareness, uh, but it's not delivering butts and seats or heads in beds or or people uh walking in the door because they're not even interested enough to click through on the links that you share that go back to your website. So new users is the first one. Second metric that everybody forgets about is returning users.

People forget about returning users. Returning users are people who are coming back to your website. They found something of sufficient value that they're like, okay, I'm gonna keep coming back. I'm gonna keep reading your blog posts, I'm gonna keep doing these things. And if they're doing it from Twitter, that's showing you that your Twitter audience is engaged, is paying attention to you, and then when you share something new, like a new blog post or a new white paper or a new announcement about a product, and it gets people to come back, that's a good thing.

That means that your Twitter audience is loyal to you, and you'll want to compare it to, say, like your Facebook audience and their returning users and things, uh, to see does Twitter do a better job than average of bringing people back? And third, are those conversions, right? Newsletter sign-ups, uh, email marketing uh sign-ups, uh, lead generation, prospect generation, whatever the thing is that your business does with its website, if you're using good web analytics software like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or whatever, you want to be able to see how did Twitter contribute to those conversions. It will not necessarily be a last touch thing, right? It will not necessarily be, hey, they came from Twitter, they bought a Gulf Stream jet.

That doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, you're very, very lucky. But did they sign up for your email newsletter? Hey, there's value in that. Uh, and you can talk another time about calculating the value of your email newsletter subscribers.

But in doing so, you can now say, hey, Twitter is pushing measurable business impacts into your pipeline, your your sales pipeline of some kind. Because again, your job, particularly with those very top of the funnel activities like social media marketing, is not to try and sell somebody something, it is to try and nudge them into the next logical step in your marketing operations funnel, and then that takes on uh doing its job. So Twitter gets you that awareness and brings some new audience to the front door, and then once somebody walks in the front door, it's up to the website to get them to take the next step, to raise the hand and say, I'm interested in learning more, and so on and so forth. If you can show that with your Twitter report, you're gonna do really well in impressing people that hey, this is a channel that matters. This is a channel that delivers people that are interested and potentially qualified, even, to our sales mechanisms, to our ability to generate revenue.

Now, here's the catch. You may find that when you put together a report like that, that Twitter doesn't generate impact for you. For some companies, it's not the place. For other companies, it absolutely is the place. It depends on your audience.

But when you do this report, expect the unexpected. And also expect people to ask, okay, this was great. Can you do this for LinkedIn, for Facebook, for Pinterest, for Instagram? And even if nobody asks you for that, you should plan to do that so that you can compare Apples to Apples with the same types of numbers from Google Analytics. What channel is delivering real results?

Where should you spend your time? If the answer is Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, then you know that. And once you establish that, then you can change your strategy, you can change your ad spend, you can pivot your tactics to where you're getting the juice. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.