Getting Started With Twitter Analytics For Real Estate

Ever wonder just how many people are actually seeing your tweets? Since the inception Twitter of in 2006, people have wondered that very question and really there was no certifiable way to know. Well wonder no more. After announcing a web analytics service way back in 2011, the service is finally became available to the general public last fall. Here's a quick rundown on what this new service has to offer and how you can be putting it to good use to help understand how to promote your real estate business.

How To Start Using Twitter Analytics

To start tracking your tweets, all you have to do is go to http://analytics.twitter.com and login using your Twitter account. At that point Twitter, will start tracking all future tweets. Unfortunately they don't do retroactive tracking of your previous posts, so you'll have to start tweeting to see any results. It may take a few days before you start getting enough data collected to see any patterns. Though with that said, one handy thing is this data comes in live, so as soon as you post a tweet, you should see some info rolling in.

Impressions and Engagements

There are two main metrics that Twitter uses to measure each tweet: Impressions and Engagements. Impressions are how many people actually saw your tweet in their stream. Engagements are how many people interacted with your tweet. Interactions aren't limited to retweets and favorites, they encompass anytime someone touched your tweet, whether they clicked a hashtag or link, viewed the whole conversation, clicked your avatar, followed you, replied, or any other way a user action applicable to a tweet. It's a very interesting metric because it really shows whether your tweet had any type of impact. The engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions.

Prior to Twitter Analytics, you'd only ever be notified if someone retweeted or favorited your tweet. You could use a third party URL shortener like Bit.ly (I still recommend using Bit.ly for this) to serve as a link tracking middle-man, but you could never really get the insight this new service is offering. By clicking on an individual tweet in the tweet activity panel, you will bring up the detailed breakdown of each of the different interaction types.

Find Out Who Your Followers Really Are

Twitter Analytics also offers a great breakdown of just who is following your Twitter account. With breakdowns by Interests, Location, Gender and who your followers also follow, it really offers a clear picture of the people you're sharing your tweets to. This type of information can definitely inform you on what type of content you should be creating and sharing, and who your target market is. For Lone Wolf, we target real estate agents and brokerages, so our demographic breakdown will skew different when compared to a brokerage or agent who is looking to connect with potential clients.

Observations So Far of Twitter Analytics

I've been using the service for a couple different Twitter accounts I run and I've started noticing some patterns. Here are a few observations I've made:

• Posts with images definitely get higher engagement numbers. The reason for this is pretty simple. Users usually have to click to make the full sized image bigger, hence why you'd be seeing more interactions.
• Your followers will never all see your tweets, often only a small fraction of them will see what you share, even if you do have a huge follower count.
• Resharing content multiple times during the day doesn't result in less engagement. The second time you share content may actually be seen by as many or more people than when you originally shared it.
• Using hashtags really can get more eyeballs on your tweets. As you can see below that spike below in my personal feed was the day of the Apple iPhone 6 announcement. Using the event hashtags bumped up my impressions substantially. Figure out how you can leverage the use of hashtags and apply them to your account.

Once you get Twitter Analytics setup for your real estate account, be sure to check back every once in awhile and see how your content is performing. With this tool you can really start gauging what is working for your followers and which content they just don't care about. Not everything you share is going to be a home run, but with these advanced analytics you can start turning those content strikeouts into single or doubles. Armed with this knowledge, you can start targeting engagement and interaction instead of just simply follows, retweets and favorites.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.