Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking your Twitter Stats

If your company is small, it probably means that – you’ve heard this before – “you wear many hats.” Perhaps one of your tasks is to analyze the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

When I joined Assistly, I found myself with a big hat closet. One of my duties was to create and manage our social media efforts. Without the luxury of procrastination, I dove in. But I didn’t want to be in the dark about what was working and what wasn’t.

I needed stats.  I needed to see if my efforts were paying off. I needed a light on in the hat closet.

The path I took for our small company would work for anyone. All it takes is a bit of organization and the will to take a few minutes every day to document your progress in a spreadsheet.

Open a Spreadsheet and Dive In

Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Think about what Twitter metrics you want to understand. I wanted to see the progress of all my efforts on Twitter so I could report on them and make adjustments to my category techniques. In general, metrics for social media generally fall into four categories:

• Activities –  my total tweet count
• Engagement – clicks, comments, retweets (actions your followers take)
• Size – number of followers
• Reach –  “mentions” others make of your company

Asking Questions: The Important First Step

Your questions determine the categories of data you will collect. For example, I wanted to know:

How many people were clicking on the links I tweeted? How many were retweeting? What kind of posts did they retweet? How many people were following Assistly? How many followers were we losing? Were we getting mentions? How many lists were we on?

Your column headings come from these questions. Here are some headings from my working spreadsheet:

Gather Actionable Stats with Helpful Tools

There are an intimidating number of tools available for social media activities and analysis. These are the four categories that were most important to help me answer my questions:

Twitter - Obviously, for Assistly, our Twitter account is the one-stop way to track total followers, accounts followed/following, total tweets, and lists.

Twitter is also an important visiting point every day in order to see our new followers, and decide who to follow back. It’s easier to keep ahead of this by checking every day, because the number of new followers each day is manageable (unless you have hundreds of new followers every day, in which case …mazel tov! Everyone should have this problem!). Following people back is an art and a science. You can be discerning or all-inclusive, but I heartily recommend avoiding the “junk” followers that are just there to advertise. I block them, without guilt.

A Tweet Shortener: I use Bit.ly for shortening Twitter links. Bit.ly also gives you analytics for daily clicks, and clicks per link. (Tip: If you are using multiple shortener methods in your tweet posts, you will need to add them together for accuracy on link clicks or daily overall counts.)

A Tweet Scheduler – Tweet schedulers not only get you set up for scheduling tweets in advance. They also track Twitter mentions and retweets and let you easily follow hashtags and specific words or phrases of interest to your organization.

“Unfollowing” Tools – Unfollowing on Twitter is normal. A lot of accounts come and go. It’s really only important to me whether people I follow are unfollowing our Twitter channel. That’s information that would alert me that I needed to correct course. For this, I use Who Unfollowed Me? It is so easy; just sign in with your Twitter account and get a look at who has unfollowed, and whether or not they were followers of your Twitter account.

Key Takeaways for a Small Business Using Social Media

Look for Patterns

Very quickly, you will begin to see patterns and adjust your tweets accordingly. Tracking social media in this simple way has given me a way to see the direction our social programs are going. When I look at the numbers, most often they are going “up and to the right” – and that’s the way you want them to go!

Check Your Ratings

Periodically check your ratings using services such as Klout. They couldn’t be any easier to use. They give you lots of great information about how you are doing compared to competitors, and the information is presented in appealing graphics. They help you up your game. Give your score a column on the sheet every quarter or so.

Take The Long View

Collect stats daily, and plan to add a row to total up each week and each month so you can see the bigger picture of progress over time. Every time you add a social channel, add a sheet to your Social Statistics Spreadsheet. Like an apple a day, it will help keep your business healthy, wealthy, and wise.

How did you develop your process for documenting Twitter progress? Do you use Twitter for customer service and support? Why or why not? What would your ideal Twitter tool look like? How do you use the metrics you collect? Do you have a specific format for reporting? Any stories about the impact Twitter has had on your company?

Alyson Button Stone is a member of the Assistly team, editing the Assistly Blog and managing the social media program. She has been “drinking out of the firehose” for startups for several years. Alyson is also on her second decade serving as a trustee for her public library.

Tags: Analytics, beginner, Guest Blogger, metrics, SMB, twitter