12 Important Twitter Metrics To Keep Track Of

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When was the last time you posted something on Twitter that flopped? Do you know the post that looked so good in the editor? You considered it would grab attention and go viral. But, hours later, you were greeted with the dreaded zero engagement. No likes, retweets, or comments. Just crickets. If you've ever experienced this, you know how disappointing it can be. But here's the thing.

It's only possible to tell how a post will perform once you publish it. But by understanding Twitter metrics, you can better understand what to expect and how to improve your chances of going viral. This guide will help you make sense of Twitter metrics and use them to enhance your social media engagement and content performance. Stick with us to learn more on how to go viral on Twitter.

Of course, there's no magic formula for going viral on Twitter. But Megaphone's viral on-demand platform can help. Our tool quickly identifies trending topics and engages your target audiences to enhance social media performance.

What Are Twitter Metrics?

Twitter metrics are data points you track to determine your success on the network. These metrics are found in your Twitter analytics. Metrics alone don’t mean anything since the benchmarks for success for an account can vary based on factors like industry niche or business size. Your Twitter metrics need to be analyzed for a specific purpose, like seeing if you met your social media goals or understanding if an ad campaign succeeded.

Metrics provide you with the data you need for several different areas: to know when to post for the most engagement, to understand your brand’s share of voice, to see how effective and responsive your customer care team is, to run a competitor analysis, and to adjust your approach to marketing campaigns. Often, multiple metrics are used together since relying on a single metric to determine a goal’s success doesn’t give the whole picture.

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12 Important Twitter Metrics To Keep Track Of

1. Follower Metrics: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?

Follower metrics are usually vanity metrics, and while they represent relevant Twitter data, other KPIs could be more appropriate for performance analysis. While every business dreams of a big audience, having many followers doesn’t necessarily translate into the success of its Twitter page. A massive Twitter following isn’t valuable if your community doesn’t interact with your brand, showing a genuine interest in it.

However, a change in followers indicates whether 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 understand better 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.

New Followers

The new follower metric is 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 primary goal is to increase brand awareness.

Followers’ Growth

The followers’ growth metric is the number of followers that has changed over time. Similarly to your new followers, this metric should be tracked consistently when leveraging strategies focused on increasing your brand awareness. If the number is positive, 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.

2. Top Tweets—The Best of the Best

When diving into your Twitter analytics metrics, one of the most important questions you should ask yourself is, “What are my top tweets?” The top tweets are your best-performing tweets (in terms of engagement or impressions) over a selected period. Knowing your top tweets 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 social media 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.

3. Engagement and Engagement Rate

According to Twitter, engagement measures the total number of user interactions with a tweet. This encompasses several ways to interact with a tweet, including clicking anywhere on the tweet, retweeting, replies, follows, likes, links, tweet expansion, and more. The engagement rate KPI 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 brand loyalty.

Although it’s a versatile metric with several other metrics under its umbrella, the engagement rate is an even more powerful Twitter metric than the raw engagement number. It correlates directly 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.

4. Retweets and Replies

Although we talked about these two Twitter metrics, as they are part of engagement, retweets and replies are some KPIs that can be analyzed as standalone data. 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 helpful, entertaining, or inspiring.

5. Link Clicks: The Gateway to Your Website

Link clicks measure the number of times a person clicks on a link inside your post. This particular Twitter metric is fundamental, as it indicates your tweets' effectiveness in driving 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 often 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 content the platform's algorithm considers most interesting to your Twitter audience, displaying it multiple times in the users' feeds. Seeing your content repeatedly will help your brand become top of mind when your followers on Twitter need the kind of products or services your business provides.

7. Video View Metrics

We all know that videos speak louder than words. 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 at least 2 seconds.

Some social media specialists claim this metric is only sometimes relevant since it does not guarantee that the Twitter user has seen your entire video and received the message you wanted to forward. That is why Twitter also offers other Twitter video metrics, such as views, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the video length. 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. Analyzing 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 essential elements in the social media world. They help social media users discover campaigns or brands' values. Therefore, your hashtag choice will be relevant to your brand identity when leveraging Twitter marketing. To ensure 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 different hashtags have contributed to your brand recognition. For example, some users on Twitter might know you by hashtags that become like a fabulous trademark for your business. Consider using the ones that performed better and see what you can do about those hashtags that didn’t 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, which is where your ideal followers are. Gaining insights into 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 is more telling than engagements or impressions. The Cost Per Result 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. You must adjust if you discover that the CPR is higher than it should be in your Twitter ad campaign.

11. Cost Per Mille (CPM)

Cost-per-mille or cost-per-thousand-impressions, also called CPM, helps you identify how much you need to pay for 1,000 impressions. This useful Twitter metric offers you insights into how much your ad campaign costs and what are the results of your paid efforts. A marketing strategy that includes social media ads can boost your brand’s potential. And when the ad content is good, the followers will… follow. Make sure that when they see your ad, they will not go past it. If something appeals to them, Twitter users will become curious.

12. Profile Clicks: What Are They and Why Are They Important?

What it measures

The number of times someone clicks on an account’s name, username, or profile photo. Why track? Profile clicks indicate someone’s interest in learning more about you, which is usually good. If they like what they see, they become a new follower.

How to track

In your Twitter Dashboard, you can see profile clicks at the Tweet level if you view individual post activity or as a totaled amount on the homepage.

Unpacking Megaphone: What is It and How Can It Help You Go Viral on Twitter?

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Why Are Twitter Metrics Important

Grasping Audience Interaction: Why Metrics Matter for Engagement on Twitter

Metrics like likes, retweets, and replies help gauge how your audience interacts with your content. High engagement shows that your content resonates with your audience, making it easier to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Measuring Content Performance: Why Impressions and Reach Matter

Metrics like impressions and reach show how many users see your tweets. By analyzing which posts (e.g., tweets, threads, visuals) perform better, you can tailor future content for higher visibility.

Evaluating Growth: Why Follower Gains Are a Key Metric

Follower growth metrics provide insight into how well you attract new users to your account. A steady increase suggests that your content and strategy are working effectively.

Tracking Conversion and ROI: Why Twitter Metrics Matter for Business

Twitter metrics can help you measure click-through rates (CTR) and link clicks, indicating how well your content drives traffic to external sites like your website. This is crucial for tracking the effectiveness of campaigns and calculating return on investment (ROI).

Informing Content Strategy: Why Twitter Analytics Help You Plan Ahead

Analyzing engagement rates and the types of content that perform well enables you to optimize your strategy. For example, if tweets with videos outperform text-based tweets, you can adjust your content mix accordingly.

Improving Brand Awareness: Why Mentions and Shares Matter

Metrics like mentions and shares show how often people talk about or spread your content. This helps you assess how well your brand is recognized and discussed within your industry or community.

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12 Tips To Enhance Your Twitter Engagement Efficiently

1. Use Megaphone

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2. Engage with Other Users' Content

To build Twitter engagement, interact with your target audience first. When you like, retweet, and respond to your users' posts, they'll be more likely to pay attention to what you're posting. This is especially true considering most brands don’t take or have the time to interact with many followers, so it can mean more when you do.

This can also help build social proof over time, which is valuable across all social media marketing platforms. It will increase engagement and help establish a relationship between you or your brand and the users you interact with, expanding the benefits more concretely—and off Twitter.

3. Keep Your Tweets Brief

Twitter limits posts to 280 characters (a significant expansion from their original 140), and we are all forced to keep our tweets relatively brief automatically. This can be challenging enough, but limiting our posts a little more can increase engagement. According to multiple sites and data, the sweet spot for shareable tweets is between 80 and 110 characters, including hashtags and user tags, especially if you want to increase retweets.

When your tweets are between 80-110 characters, they’re more likely to offer value in whatever form you aim for (whether that’s to entertain, inform, or share an opinion) while still being brief enough that users can easily retweet them. When at this length, users will have enough room to briefly add their thoughts or hashtags while referring back to you. If you were to use all 280, on the other hand, users would have to edit your tweet and cut it down so they could add their text, and for many, this is just too much work.

If you want to get clicks to your site, put links in your Tweets. While you want to share links to your most valuable content, sending traffic to your site, you also want to share content from others. With social media, you never want to make it all about you and your brand; Twitter is no exception. If you find great content off Twitter, share it there and tag the brand/user who created it if possible; they’ll appreciate it, and some of your users might, too.

Sharing links that you find valuable—and that aren’t your own—can encourage users to pay more attention to what you’re posting. Even better, it can build relationships between you and your users and other industry leaders whose content you’re sharing, and they might later share your content in return. This can help increase engagement and send more traffic and new visitors to your site as a bonus.

5. Know Your Peak Hours

Like with Facebook, there will be certain times or days of the week when more of your users will be active on the site or more likely to engage with your content. By finding those peak hours and posting during them, you’ll get more views and be more likely to increase engagement and clicks on your post.

Some studies have shown that posting between 12:00 and 3:00 on Mondays through Fridays is among the best times, while others have found slightly different peak hours. Adweek found that 5 p.m. had the highest retweets while posting between 12 and 6 p.m. provided the highest CTR. Most studies consistently found that daily posting yielded the highest engagement and CTRs.

6. Use Twitter Ads

When looking to best engagement quickly, Twitter Ads can be an excellent way to do so, especially if you don’t have a lot of followers or followers that frequently engage with your content. Twitter Ads cost money (and can be more expensive than Facebook Ads), but they can still help increase engagement when needed. Promoted tweets work best for this purpose. Though Twitter ads can be more expensive, some users have found that Twitter’s click-through rates are superior. When you want to drive traffic offsite, Twitter Ads is a good, albeit not free, solution. You can create Twitter Ads by locating the tab on the same dropdown menu where you can find Twitter Analytics, which offers reporting features for engagement and conversion tracking.

7. Use Twitter Conversational Ads

Conversational Ads are in beta, so not everyone has them yet. Some people do, and they will be a powerful tool to drive engagement. Conversational Ads are designed purely to increase engagement and brand influence. They follow the idea of promoted tweets but come with the addition of CTAs that encourage users to tweet with hashtags the brand can customize and choose.

When a user clicks on the CTA, the Tweet composer opens with a “pre-populated brand message” that users can customize and share, after which they’ll automatically be thanked. Part of the reason these can be so powerful is that you’re not just getting engagement on your post, but your paid post will ideally spawn and inspire multiple organic posts that are tied to your brand. Though it’s still in beta testing, watch for these; they will be a great tool when they roll out.

8. Always Provide Value

Social media, for many, has become an environment where many users are inclined to share every thought that pops into their heads. While non-brand users can get away with letting the world know they can’t decide if they want a Coke or lemonade, brands definitely cannot. Brands can offer value in different ways; posts can seek to provide value by entertaining, informing, inspiring, or persuading users. Providing value, in whatever form you choose, is among the most critical factors to success with content marketing. Value will keep users coming back and staying interested, and—best of all—engaging with and clicking on the tweets you’re posting.

9. Always Use Hashtags

Hashtags are essential to Twitter usage; just like with Instagram, you expect a Tweet to come with at least one hashtag. Not only do hashtags offer the benefit of helping a relevant audience find you when they search the hashtag you’re using, but they can also increase engagement.

Tweets that include hashtags can see as much as a 1,065% increase in engagement compared to a similar tweet without hashtags, and tweets with hashtags are 33% more likely to get retweeted than those without them. This makes sense, considering the additional eyes you may get, as well as hashtags, fit into the culture of Twitter usage.

However, less can also be more: tweets with only one hashtag are 69% more likely to be retweeted than those with two hashtags. Whether using a specific, branded hashtag or one relevant to your audience or industry, you should always aim to have one on each tweet. Tapping into trending topics via a popular hashtag is also a great way to increase engagement and impressions.

Images are essential to social media; this is particularly true when we’re limited to only 280 characters, which go much faster than you’d think. If you’re not posting images on at least some of your tweets, you should be; some case studies have shown that tweets with images get 313% more engagement. Images are more dynamic, whether you’re sharing an infographic, a graph to display data, or a photograph. You can share up to 4 images in a single tweet, but even using just one image is all it takes to drive extra engagement. Plus, when in doubt, you can always add text to your pictures if you need to get a few additional characters in; no 20% rule applies here.

11. Post Videos

While images can get more attention than text, videos continue the trend and can outperform images. Twitter Video, released about a year ago, allows you to either record a new video from your smartphone or upload an existing video if you have an iPhone. The time limit is 30 seconds, but since you’ll lose most viewers after 30 seconds, that’s ok. 82% of Twitter users watch video content on the social media platform.

It’s also good to note that studies have shown that native video on Twitter tends to drive significantly more engagement than those from third-party players (resulting in 2.5x more replies, 2.8x more retweets, and 1.9x more favorites). Video can be a great way to break new stories, offer a behind-the-scenes look, evoke emotion, and give extra life to your posts on Twitter. Videos are dynamic, and it only makes sense they can drastically increase engagement and CTRs.

12. Space Out Your Tweets

When sending those 1-4 tweets daily, don’t send them all at once; space them out evenly through your peak hours or throughout the entire day. This will increase the number of audience members who might see your posts, helping to increase engagement. This is a simple strategy, but it’s a good one, and when done deliberately, it often has good results.

How To Check Important Twitter Metrics

Twitter Account Home Page: Where It All Begins

The starting point for checking Twitter metrics is your account home page. You’ll get an overview of your account activity from the Home tab for the past 28 days. This includes your tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and follower count. Each metric consists of a small activity graph and increases or decreases since the last period. Scroll down on your account home page to view highlights of your account activity over the past few months, such as top tweets, followers, and top mentions.

Tweet Activity: Digging Deeper into Your Twitter Metrics

Click on the Tweets tab at the top of the page to view your tweet activity. This page is broken up into a series of tabs. Under the default Tweets tab, you’ll see your tweets from the past 28 days, with the latest on top. This is useful for scrolling down and glancing over data—impressions, engagements, and engagement rate—for individual tweets.

A graph at the top breaks down impressions by day. There’s also a series of graphs on the right side of the page that show the fluctuation of this data. Regardless of what tab you select, the graphs remain visible. You can use these graphs to track the performance of tweets, plus they’re helpful when planning future content as part of your social media planning.

Top Tweets: Discovering Your Most Impactful Content

Click Top Tweets to see your tweets ordered from the most to the fewest impressions. Here, you can see which of your tweets are getting the most exposure. This is a great way to identify what content resonates with your audience.

Tweets and Replies: Tracking All Your Conversations

This tab is almost precisely like the Tweets tab—with your tweets in chronological order—but it shows both your original tweets and my replies. My reply tweets behave just like regular tweets in that they can engage your followers and lead potential followers to me, so it’s worth keeping an eye on them. (The Top Tweets tab includes replies, too.)

Promoted: Tracking Your Twitter Ad Performance

You can watch those tweets here if you’ve already signed up for promoted tweets through Twitter Ads. Twitter Business offers several paid features that integrate with Analytics. But don’t worry; you can still do plenty with Analytics without paying anything.

Video Activity: Measuring Your Twitter Video Performance

Select Videos under the More tab to access your video activity. This page shows how your promoted videos are performing.

Conversion Tracking: Monitoring Your Business Goals

This tab is devoted to another option available through Twitter Business: conversion tracking. This lets you track users' actions, like visiting your website.

Go Viral Today with Our Viral on Demand Platform

When you want to go viral on Twitter, it’s not all about the impressions and engagement. Those metrics are excellent, but they don’t tell the whole story. You can grow impressions and engagement on a post without actually going viral. What you want to track are the Twitter metrics that matter, and the best way to do that is to keep an eye on these numbers before, during, and after any promotional push.

Tracking Twitter metrics before a push can help you identify your goals and understand what content your audience engages with the most. This will help you create a viral thread or post that aligns with your audience’s interests. Monitoring Twitter metrics during your push will help you understand how your content is performing and if any adjustments are necessary. Finally, tracking the numbers after your viral push will help you know how the post performed, what audience it attracted, and how this content aligns with your Twitter goals.