Basic Twitter KPIs you should track if you aren't already

Intro

You may be thinking to yourself what's a KPI? KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, but you can think of it as just another fancy way of saying metric. Don't worry, you don't actually have to do very much manual labor to calculate these metrics. Sparrowan do it for you! 😃

There are 6 basic KPIs that are worth tracking on Twitter, they are Followers, Clicks, Retweets, Mentions, Engagement Rate, and Favorites.

Followers

If someone follows you on Twitter, that means they are engaged with your content for the long-run. As your posts will appear on their feed, it is important to keep them engaged. You want to focus specifically on New Followers. How many people followed my page this month? What was the percent increase in following this month? Depending on how large your following is and what your promotions budget is, you should set a percent increase target for new followers per month. If you are reaching that number, things are going well, if you're not, you need to change something.

Clicks

Many people bucket clicks with engagement. Having a general engagement goal is helpful, however, without tracking clicks, you won't know how successful your call to action is. Sometimes you may include a link in your post. It could be a link to a blog, your website, a survey, or something else. Fast Food companies like McDonald's and Taco Bell often A/B test posts to see which one results in the most purchases. It is important to know where people who visit your website are coming from. A good Tweet can result in lots of link clicks!

Retweets

Essentially, when someone retweets your tweet, not only does your post appear in all your followers' feeds, it appears in all their followers' fields as well. This can be super helpful to increase the reach of your post; it brings your content in front of more screens. Retweets also often get bucketed into engagement rate, the more retweets a post gets, the higher its engagement rate. Shoot to have people with more followers than you retweet your content, because that could get your post seen by a lot more people than just your followers alone.

Mentions

A mention is when another Twitter account tags you in a post. Knowing who is tweeting about you is important as it can increase brand awareness. Positive mentions are awesome and can be in the form of a testimonial from a happy client. Unfortunately, mentions can also be negative and call out your brand, usually as a result of customer or employee dissatisfaction. You obviously want to avoid negative press, however, not responding to a negative mention can look bad. Try to nullify the situation by acknowledging the issue and state your intent to correct it. This just shows you care what people are saying (or "mentioning") about you. A sub-metric within mentions to look at is the Top Mention, or the tweet another user has mentioned you in that has the greatest reach. Hopefully, your top mention is a positive one!

Engagement Rate

Knowing the engagement rate of your posts should be a good indicator of how successful your content is. With Twitter, there are a lot of ways for people to engage with your content. Twitter will assess engagement every time someone uses your branded hashtag, clicks on a link, favorites your page, follows you, links back to you, replies to your post, and retweets you. All these metrics together combine to form one number, your engagement rate! The higher your engagement rate, the more people are interacting with your content.

Favorites

Lastly, you want to look at Favorites. If you're a Twitter aficionado, you'd know that Twitter doesn't have favorites anymore and replaced favorites with likes in 2015. Whether you call it Favorite or Like, the icon to focus on is the heart. You want people to like your posts on Twitter as it's an indicator of how they feel about your content. Likes are bucketed into engagement along with retweets. You should continue to make sure that your posts get liked and increase the post frequency of content that gets the most likes. If a lot of people saw your post but didn't like it, it may be time to explore new content.

Conclusion

Followers, Clicks, Retweets, Mentions, Engagement Rate, and Favorites are all KPIs Sparrow tracks and most marketing agencies include in their report. They are all fairly basic and give you a good overview of how successful your page and posts are. You should care about how people perceive your content because, at the end of the day, they are the ones purchasing your product or service. Consideration of these metrics doesn't require much effort, it's easy and can make you more money!

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