Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Analytics: A Quick Look

Social media analytics is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing data from social networks. In University Communications, we use analytics to both understand social media performance and to inform future decisions about how we present and share content on our platforms.

Today, we’re going to talk about how we collect this valuable information, specifically on Twitter.

Twitter analytics shows you how your audience is responding to your content, what’s working, and what’s not. You can use data-driven insights to optimize your future content and get better results whether that’s more engagement, more website traffic, or more overall impressions.

You can access Twitter Analytics by visiting analytics.twitter.com or by tapping your profile and selecting “Analytics” from the drop down menu:

Account home

When you first log in, you’ll see the account home page, which is basically a monthly Twitter report card. This page spotlights top-performing tweets and introduces you to influencers in your network:

Twitter Activity Dashboard

Although the Twitter analytics home page provides a nice overview, the best information (IMO) is on the Tweet Activity Dashboard. By clicking the “Tweet” tab, you’ll be able to track the number of impressions, engagements, and engagement rate for each and every Tweet you send:

For a more granular view of the volume of each type of engagement, you can click on the specific Tweet:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screencapture-analytics-twitter-user-DukeU-tweets-2021-05-18-12_05_47-1.jpg

This allows you to suss out the specific types of engagements your Tweet received. For example, we know that a Tweet with a social media card will on average receive more link clicks than a Tweet with a photo and the link in the Twitter caption.

But the most useful feature (again IMO) is the ability to adjust the date range and export your data as a CSV file:

This feature allows you to sort through the exported data using Excel in ways that are impossible within the platform itself.

Now what?

There are several data columns in the export, so you can develop a customized analysis on whatever metric makes the most sense for your account strategy. Here are a couple common terms and definitions to get you started:

Impressions
A total tally of all the times a Tweet has been seen.

Reach
The number of users who saw an impression of your Tweet in their timeline. Twitter does not provide this metric in their analytics dashboard, so generally you would need a third-party tool to determine your reach.

Engagement
A Twitter user’s interaction with a Tweet, including Retweets, replies, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, or Tweet expansion.

Engagement Rate
This varies slightly by platform, but for Twitter engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by impressions.

Clicks
There are several kinds of Twitter “clicks” available in the downloaded analytics — user profile clicks, url clicks, hashtag clicks, etc. For our purposes, we track url clicks to determine the amount of traffic we’re driving to Duke websites.

We use Excel to aggregate our data so we can find common trends among our top Tweets, determine particular days/times that work best with our audience, and compare our performance year-over-year.

Duke University Social Media Twitter Analytics Summary Spreadsheet
@DukeU Twitter Analytics Over Time
April 2021 Analytics Monthly Snapshot

By understanding which content items get the most engagement, you can start seeing trends over time — and then applying those insights to future tweets — you’ll be able to better connect with your audience.

How to Make the Most of Your Website on Social Media

To get the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll want to make sure that your website links show up properly. So today, we’re going to talk about the importance of ensuring your website looks great on social media and provide the tools that’ll help enhance your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You’re likely already aware that each page of your website should have a title tag and meta description for SEO reasons. But did you also realize you can specifically customize how your website content displays on social media platforms? The customizations are called social media cards and they make your content more engaging by adding images and summaries when you (or anyone else for that matter) share your links on social media.

Similar to the meta tags that tell programmatic robots (like Google) about the pages on your site, social media bots scan the page associated with your link to determine what info should be displayed with it in a user’s newsfeed. If the bots can’t find anything, they take their best guess. The results can vary from boring to comical. But by enabling social media cards on your website, you can control these meta tags so social media platforms accurately determine the title, description, and image that gets displayed. 

The two main types of tags you’ll need are Twitter Cards and Open Graph. 

Twitter Cards

The difference between a bare hyperlink and an engaging Tweet is a small bit of code on your link’s website.

In order for these lovely link previews to display on Twitter, your website must have Twitter Cards enabled. Adding a few lines of markup on your website means links to your content will have a “Card” with photo, title, and description to help drive readers to your content.

There are technically four different types of Twitter cards, but the one we find most useful is “Summary Card with Large Image.”

Once the correct meta tags are added to your webpage (either by you or your website administrator), you can run the URL through the validator tool to test how the link will look on Twitter. This tool also works for any website if you’d like to see what a link would look like before Tweeting. This is helpful since sometimes websites use different images in their meta tags than appear on the site itself.

A few notes:

  • The most commonly recommended image size for social media cards is 1200×628 since this size fits on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For Twitter, you’ll want your image to be at least 300×157 and no bigger than 4096×4096.
  • Often, Twitter Cards are set to pull the first image on a page as a default. Be careful with this since Twitter will crop the image to make it fit the card. You might end up with a pixelated version or a vertical headshot where only the person’s nose is visible.
  • If you update the tags for your page (say you found a typo in your title or need to switch out the image), you’ll want to use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of your page’s URL. This will cause Twitter to pull the new meta tag, ensuring that the most recent, accurate information is shared. Otherwise, Twitter might pull from an outdated cache instead. 

Open Graph

Facebook and LinkedIn both generate link previews based on Open Graph meta tags. Like Twitter, if these Open Graph tags are missing or incomplete, the link preview will also be incomplete.

Facebook Guide to Sharing for Webmasters
Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

The Facebook Debugger is a great tool to see how a Facebook link will look before you post it. It’ll let you see all the information that the Facebook Crawler is pulling. Like Twitter, if you updated the image or preview text and it’s not displaying, click “Scrape Again” once or twice to force Facebook to get the updated information.

Recommendations from Facebook:

  • 200×200 pixels is the minimum allowed image dimensions.
  • The image file size cannot exceed 8 MB.
  • If your image is smaller than 600×315 pixels, it’ll still display but the size will be much smaller.
  • When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook Crawler scrapes and caches the meta data from the URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered, which means the first person who shares your link won’t see a rendered image. You can pre-cache your images and avoid this by running the URL through the Debugger.
  • If you update the image, the original share will continue to show unless you refresh it in the post.

Since LinkedIn also used Open Graph tags, it functions much like Facebook. The LinkedIn Post Inspector works just like the Facebook Debugger. Paste your URL and select “Inspect” to see what your link will look like on LinkedIn.

So if your site doesn’t currently have social media cards, we’d highly recommend having them added.

How to Setup Open Graph and Twitter Cards for WordPress

If various reasons prevent the addition of social media cards to your website, you can still share your content on social media. It’s just a little bit harder. 

Our recommendation is to share your text with the link and applicable image. Make sure to use the correct image size for the social media platform. Also, to meet accessibility standards, you’ll need to add alt text to the image. This can be done natively in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but only a few schedulers (Hootsuite, Sprout, etc.) have this feature. And lastly, we do have a Duke-branded link shortener available through Shib login.

So in summary, it’s key to properly manage your website content and how it displays on social media platforms rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn determine how it’s displayed for you. By optimizing Twitter Cards and Open Graph and validating the accuracy of your website content in how it’s displayed, you can curate your content specifically for each audience you have on different social channels.

Using Social Media Effectively in Higher Education

Do you work with social media in higher education and wonder whether you should focus on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram … or something else? Which investment will give you the biggest benefit? Which matches best with the content you typically produce?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJiKT2cRLCc

A new video from Duke’s Office of News & Communications, “Using Social Media Effectively in Higher Education,” helps you think through your options.

I originally delivered this presentation at Duke’s 2014 social media mash-up a few months ago. This spring, I worked with Cara Rousseau, Carson Mataxis, James Todd, Sonja Foust and others to capture it in video format. We’ve also prepared a helpful PDF checklist that you can use as a reference.

We hope you find the video helpful. Share your thoughts on using these different social networks in the comments below!

The Anatomy of a Tweet

Lots of people are figuring out how to use Twitter across campus. Some communicators, students and faculty could write the book on tweeting. But, if you’re like the majority, you’re still figuring out what Twitter is and what in the world to do with a hashtag (#).

Getting started on Twitter is a little like learning a new language in a new country. The first thing you should do is simply create a Twitter account and listen. You get bonus points for uploading an image (and getting rid of the easter egg default photo) and creating a profile of yourself.

Next up, find some interesting people and news outlets to listen TO. A great place to get started is at the All Duke Tweeters list @DukeNews maintains. Simply click on the profile name of anyone tweeting something of interest and click “follow” to have their tweets show up in your homepage stream.

Now that you’re listening, you’ll probably be curious about all of the acronyms and symbols you’re seeing. Here’s a little Twitter glossary to help you understand what these terms mean:

After you’ve listened enough to comfortable with the new world of Twitter, try crafting your own tweet, perhaps by sharing links and content that interest you. One of the best uses of Twitter is swapping content.

Now that you’re part of the conversation, consider using a special desktop and mobile tool to help you organize your tweets and to filter searches for content. Two popular options are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Both allow you to create streams of customized content and searches so you can view what’s important to you and sort out the noise.

I’m happy to answer questions and provide more details to help you. Stay tuned on this blog for posts on how you can create your own effective Twitter strategy.

***Updated on May 22, 2012

My colleague Anton Zuiker wrote a fabulous Twitter 101 blog post about getting started with Twitter in bite-sized pieces. Please read it here.