Being one of the oldest social media platforms, in an attempt to keep up with the latest social media trends, Twitter faced up a long series of changes over the years. Especially lately, since its rebranding into X.
These constant changes, which often translated into the adoption of new features, have led to an extended list of data that marketers need to keep an eye on to understand their brand's performance on Twitter and identify strategy improvement insights.
This raises the question of what Twitter metrics are nowadays most important to track for a long-term performance boost, which we'll dig into right away. Let's dive in!
11 Twitter metrics that offer valuable performance insights
A. What are Twitter metrics, and why are they important?
B. Top 11 Twitter metrics to track in 2024
A. What are Twitter metrics, and why are they important?
Twitter metrics represent a series of KPIs that measure how your Twitter page is performing, allowing you to evaluate your strategy and discover if your current content plan is effective in achieving the goals you've set for your Twitter marketing efforts.
Twitter performance metrics are important because they offer you insights into how to optimize your content to get better result.
By overseeing your metrics on Twitter, you can gain a deeper understanding of the type of content that resonates with your audience, both in terms of messaging and formats, discover when is the best time to post, what hashtags are more effective, and so on.
Now that we've explained why your metrics on Twitter should be kept under observation let's proceed to the data that is the most important to track.
B. Top 11 Twitter metrics to track in 2024
1. Follower metrics
Follower metrics are usually vanity metrics, and while they stand for relevant Twitter data, other KPIs could be more relevant for performance analysis.
While every business dreams of a big audience, obviously, having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into the success of their Twitter page.
A massive Twitter following isn’t that valuable if your community doesn’t interact with your brand, showing a genuine interest in it.
However, a change in followers remains an indicator of whether or not your content strategy is on the right path for producing growth.
Below, you'll find a couple of more in-depth Twitter follower metrics that you can investigate to gain a deeper understanding of how successful your Twitter content is in attracting more eyes to your business.
PS: This Twitter metric is available in the overview section of the platform's native analytics dashboard.
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New followers
The new follower metric is pretty self-explanatory. It refers to the number of Twitter followers you gain over a certain period.
This metric will tell you that a new part of Twitter's audience found your profile interesting enough to follow it.
NOTE: Follower metrics should be tracked with greater diligence, especially when your Twitter marketing strategy's main goal is to increase brand awareness.
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Followers’ growth
The followers’ growth metric is the number of followers that has changed over a period of time.
Similarly to your new followers, this metric should be tracked consistently when you're leveraging strategies focused on increasing your brand awareness.
If the number is positive, it means you’re on a good path and your audience is interested in your Twitter content.
On the contrary, if the number decreases, you should look into what content strategies drove that drop to avoid them in the future.
Being a more in-depth Twitter metric, to gain access to this type of data, you'll need to leverage a third-party analytics tool, such as Socialinsider, that enables performance insights from multiple angles.
TIP: To create a loyal fan base, constantly engaging with your followers by replying and retweeting is the key to success.
2. Top tweets
One of the most important questions you should ask yourself when diving into your Twitter analytics metrics should be, “What are my top tweets?”
The top tweets are your best-performing tweets (in terms of engagement or impressions) over a selected period.
Knowing what your top tweets are is a great starting point for your Twitter audit process because it can give you a sense of what your audience wants to see and engage with.
If you analyze your top tweets for an extended time - at least a couple of months - you’ll be able to observe trends and patterns among your audience that you can use to maximize your content strategy.
To access your top tweets metric, open your Twitter analytics dashboard from the native app, and your Top tweets by impressions over the last 28 days will be displayed on the home page.
Using Socialinsider's Twitter analytics tool, your top tweets by engagement can be found in the Content section. A great advantage of leveraging a third-party app to look at your Twitter metrics is that it enables the posts analysis over a larger timeframe than the native platform.
3. Twitter engagement and engagement rate
According to Twitter, engagement measures the total number of interactions a user has with a tweet.
This encompasses several ways someone could interact with a tweet, including clicking anywhere on the tweet, retweets, replies, follows, likes, links, tweet expansion, and more.
The engagement rate metric is one of the most popular social media metrics out there because it’s a good indicator of how likable your brand is. It’s often used to analyze goals related to loyalty.
Although it’s a versatile metric that includes several other metrics under its umbrella, the engagement rate is an even more powerful Twitter metric than the purely raw engagement number.
It is directly correlated with other important metrics (such as impressions or number of followers), depending on what you’re trying to measure.
Twitter calculates the engagement rate per tweet by impressions: the number of engagements divided by tweets, all divided by impressions.
But you can also calculate the average engagement rate per tweet by followers on Twitter, depending on your social media goals. Here’s the formula:
4. Retweets and replies
Although we kind of talked about these two Twitter metrics, as they are part of engagement as well, retweets and replies are some KPIs that can be analyzed as standalone data as well.
Retweets and replies represent Twitter metrics that highlight how valuable your Twitter audience finds your content.
When your Twitter followers invest their time into taking meaningful actions that foster a relationship with your brand, that's a great indicator that they appreciate your content and perceive your brand as being helpful, entertaining, or inspiring.
5. Link clicks
Link clicks measure the number of times a person clicks on a link inside your post.
This particular Twitter metric is a very important one, as it offers an indicator of the effectiveness of your tweets to drive traffic to your website, which is the first step toward getting a lead or, even better, a sale.
PS: This Twitter metric is displayed in the native app under the Engagement section.
6. Impressions
The Twitter impressions metric indicates how many times your posts were seen by the platform's users, including multiple views from the same person.
This type of Twitter analytics data offers insights into the type of content that the platform's algorithm considers to be of most interest to your Twitter audience, therefore displaying it multiple times in the users' feeds.
Seeing your content repeatedly will help your brand to become top of mind when your followers on Twitter are in need of the kind of products or services your business is providing.
If this particular metric is of interest to you, then we have some good news. Within Socialinsider, you have access to an extended list of KPIs related to impressions, such best time to post by impressions or impressions evolution.
7. Video views
We all know that videos speak louder than words. Well, it is actually “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but you get the point.
With the growing popularity of videos on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels, Twitter needs to step in, and marketers started using this type of content more.
Video views measure how many people have seen your native video content when uploaded to Twitter. This Twitter metric is available within the platform's native analytics feature.
The video view metric on Twitter can tell you a lot about how your followers perceive your videos. A video view counts when at least 50% of the video is displayed on a user’s screen and played for a minimum of 2 seconds.
Some social media specialists claim that this metric is not always relevant since it does not guarantee that the Twitter user has seen your entire video and received the whole message you wanted to forward.
That is why Twitter also offers other Twitter video metrics like views to 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the video length.
Here is when we start talking about video retention rate.
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Video completion rate
The video completion rate metric (as seen in the image above) on Twitter tracks how many of your followers have seen your videos entirely. This KPI is available within Twitter's native analytics app.
An analysis of this Twitter metric will indicate how effective your current video strategy is and provide insights on how long your videos for Twitter should be.
8. Hashtag performance
Hashtags are important elements in the social media world. They help social media users discover campaigns or brands' values. Therefore, when leveraging Twitter marketing, your hashtag choice will be relevant to your brand identity.
To make sure you optimize your content strategy to the fullest, your hashtag choice should be based on a performance analysis.
Hashtags performance metrics will show you how much different hashatgs have contributed to your brand recognition. For example, some users on Twitter might know you by some hashtags that become like a cool trademark for your business.
Consider using the ones that performed better and see what you can do about those hashtags that didn’t really attract followers. Twitter hashtags help you appear in more page results when you have a relevant profile.
9. Best time to post
Identifying your optimal posting schedule is crucial for the success of your marketing strategy. Your best time to post is influenced by your target audience - meaning where your ideal followers are located.
Gaining insights on this kind of Twitter data will help you improve your Twitter performance and get better numbers for all your other KPIs.
10. Cost Per Results (CPR)
If, until now, we've only talked about metrics related to organic content, it's time to take a look at a metric that can give you insights into Twitter advertising.
The best Twitter metric to measure your campaign success when setting up a Twitter advertising campaign is called Cost Per Results, also known as CPR.
CPR is an overview metric that it's a bit more telling than engagements or impressions.
The Cost Per Results is calculated as the average cost of each relevant action that a user takes on one of your Twitter ads.
By running Twitter ads, you can reach your marketing and business goals quicker, and with the help of the CPR metric, you'll know which campaign is cost-effective.
If you discover that the CPR is higher than it should be in your Twitter ad campaign, then you'll probably need to make some adjustments.
11. Cost Per Mille (CPM)
Cost-per-mille or cost per a thousand impressions, known also as CPM, helps you identify the amount of money you need to pay for 1,000 impressions.
This useful Twitter metric offers you insights about how much your ad campaign costs and what are the results of your paid efforts.
A marketing strategy that includes social media ads can really boost your brand’s potential.
And when the ad content is good, the followers will…well, follow. Make sure that when they see your ad, they will not go past it. If there is something that appeals to them, Twitter users will become curious.
Final thoughts
There you have it! A comprehensive list of Twitter metrics that can help you evaluate your Twitter performance.
Still, there is always more to include, especially if you’re a heavy user of Twitter advertising.
You should know by now that using Twitter as part of your social media strategy offers many business benefits.
FAQs about Twitter metrics data
#1. How are Twitter metrics divided?
- Content metrics
- Audience data
- Video activity
One of the great advantages of leveraging a third-party analytics tool like Socialinsider to access your Twitter metrics is that it also offers competitive insights, altogether with industry benchmarks.
#2. Does Twitter provide reach metrics?
On Twitter, reach refers to the number of unique individuals who have seen your tweet. You can calculate it by dividing the number of impressions by the number of followers and then multiplying your results by 100.
#3. How is Twitter's engagement measured?
For its engagement formula, Twitter takes into consideration all clicks anywhere on the post (including links, avatar, username, post expansion and hashtags), altogether with any repost, replies, follows and likes.
Important to note is that some interactions weigh more than others, as follows:
- each like gets a 30x boost;
- each retweet gets a 20x boost;
- each reply gets a 1x boost.
