How to Use Twitter Analytics for Free

If you are a non-professional Twitter user, in that you are not using Twitter to promote a commercial enterprise, push a product or maybe just generally take over the world with your ego, then you have probably never paid to advertise your tweets. If you have entered the world of Twitter ads, you would have enjoyed their analytics dashboard, which tells you all sorts of interesting things about how people interact with your tweets, who exactly is doing the interacting, how often and where they are doing it.

It makes sense to give paying customers this information, since it shows them if the advertising they are paying for is paying off and giving them increased Twitter traffic and interaction.

There’s now a perfectly legitimate way you can enjoy most of this analytical info without paying anything, all you have to do is visit the Twitter ad portal while logged into your Twitter account and you can enjoy all the benefits of the analytics without any obligation to actually buy any advertising. So log into Twitter and then visit this link – https://ads.twitter.com/

If you are logged in, this should automatically take you to the campaign screen for your Twitter account, with a prompt to enter your credit card details. Ignore this prompt and at the top left of the screen click the word Analytics. A drop down menu offering “Tweet Activity”, “Followers” and “Twitter Cards” will pop up. Twitter now offers access to the Twitter Activity and Followers information for free, so just click on either of these for detailed historical statistics on all sorts of things regarding your twitter account.

Twitter Activity will show you a selectable list of all your recent tweets, just click on one to drill down for even more detailed information on each tweet. You can choose custom periods to analyse using the drop down boxes at the top, and you even get nice instant graphs of any information you request.

Choosing the Followers option will show you a graph of your followers since the day you opened your account, hopefully it’s gone upwards, and a nice breakdown of what countries and cities your followers live in, their gender, who else they follow and what their interests are. Be prepared for an insight into your friends and fans that might tell you as much about yourself as it does your followers.

For anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a few weeks, this is a fascinating and free way of seeing just how well received your 140 characters are and once you visit it once, you’ll find yourself popping back regularly for more analytical fun.

[Image via Russ Payne]