Twitter’s New Activity Dashboard Helps Advertisers Measure Organic Tweets

With Twitter’s newly enhanced Tweet activity dashboard, advertisers, verified users, and Twitter card publishers will be able to see metrics like impressions and engagement rates for their organic (read: non-promoted) tweets for the first time.

Previously, Twitter provided these users with analytics for their promoted (paid for) tweets, but the new tool offers them a comprehensive view of how their organic tweets are performing.

“Twitter has never offered this level of granularity to brands without huge ad buys or partnership deals,” says Brad Eshbach, senior content innovation specialist at socialdeviant, a Chicago-based social media agency. “But now, any brand has access to a dashboard, and can assess their tweet performance in real time, rather than waiting for a monthly engagement report.”

At the heart of the new tool is expansive access to data. With the dashboard, advertisers can:

• See the performance of their tweets, in real-time.
• Compare impressions, total engagements, and retweets on a monthly basis.
• See the number of retweets, replies, favorites, follows, link clicks, and embedded media clicks that a single tweet received.
• Export tweet performance metrics, including both organic and promoted data, into a CSV file.

The organic data, which focuses on impressions and total engagements, will help advertisers improve their content strategy on Twitter, according to the platform.

“Twitter’s new dashboard aims to give marketers a much clearer picture of how their content is performing, especially when it comes to measuring impressions,” says Luke Carrell, strategy director at We Are Social, a social media agency. “Since Twitter’s emphasis continues to be on real-time engagement, it’s important that measurement should be able to keep up with the content itself.”

Mauricio Aguayo, director of digital strategy at New York-based digital studio Click 3X, adds that the updated dashboard will also present an opportunity for content creators and influencers on Twitter.

“If content creators use these metrics wisely, the value of a Twitter influencer to a brand campaign will presumably increase, and so will costs to partner with them,” he notes.

To get the most out of the new activity dashboard, Twitter has provided some suggestions for advertisers, including:

• Pay attention to when you tweet.
• Analyze the frequency of your tweets.
• Keep an eye on elements, including copy length, different calls to action, and the inclusion of rich media.

Carrell points out that “Details and hard numbers [like the time and the frequency] around impressions are obviously important,” but adds that these more-refined metrics will also help provide a clearer picture of the true impact of engagement on Twitter and how that plays out in close to real time.

“I imagine many brands and marketers will benefit from this more nuanced view, but many will also be surprised by what they see playing out,” he adds.