It may seem impossible to engage with your followers effectively with Twitter’s 140 character limit. But what if you know what tweets are already engaging with your followers? Tracking engagement is one of the best ways to learn about what matters to your community and helps inform your social media strategy. And the great thing is, there are plenty of free and paid tools that do just that!
Here are 5 tools that track engagement on Twitter, providing you with valuable insights on how to better engage with your followers.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter already offers Analytics for each twitter account. Twitter hopes you would leverage the insights to plan Twitter ad campaigns. While that is a possible tactic, the tool also provides valuable insights for better engagement. Twitter Analytics shows you a 28 days summary of your tweet impressions, profit visits, mentions, followers, and tweets linking to you.
It also shows how these metrics have changed over the previous 28 days. The tool also gives you a monthly snapshot of your top tweet, top mention, top follower, top media tweet, and top card tweet, for the past 12 months. With this information, you can identify what type of tweets solicits more engagements with your followers. Incorporate this insight into your content calendar to improve engagement.
Bitly
With 140 characters, you need to employ every trick possible to keep your message concise and succinct. One way to keep your tweets short is to use a link shortener every time. Bitly is a great tool for that purpose.
At the same time, Bitly can offer you insights on your links! Bitly gives you the numbers of clicks on each link in the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, the last 14 days, and the last 30 days. You can also easily compare the stats of your links over the last 7 days. Many factors can affect the popularity of a link. For links with weak stats, consider rewording your tweets. For links with strong stats, consider reposting.
Buffer
Tweets get lost easily in the Twitter stream. Tweet scheduling gives you the flexibility to space out your tweets. Buffer is an easy-to-use scheduling tool, and it offers analytics on your tweets. In the free plan, Buffer counts the number clicks, mentions, and favorites of your tweets. You can easily re-Buffer popular tweets.
Buffer offers paid plans that provide deeper insights and trends on your tweets, but the plans start at $50 per month. Unless you are managing social media for multiple organizations, the free plan is probably the best choice.
Twitter Counter
Twitter Analytics gives you insights on your top tweets. Bitly gives you insights on links shortened using that tool. Buffer gives you information on tweets scheduled on that platform. To get a full picture, you may need more. Twitter Counter gives you more, starting at $6 per month.
With Twitter Counter, you can track your retweets, mentions, and favorites. You also have insights on when is the best days and times to tweet for higher engagement. With the information provided by Twitter Counter, you know what content you need for your content calendar. You also know when to schedule your tweets for maximum impact.
Commun.it
Social is a two-way interaction. At the end of the day, engagement is not just about how your followers are engaging with your content. Engagement should be about how your followers are engaging with you. One way to drive engagement is to start conversations. Commun.it automates initiating conversations. For example, each time someone follows you, you can send that person a thank you tweet.
Furthermore, Commun.it tracks the conversations and tracks your mentions and replies. This tool is also helpful for social media teams since everyone would have visibility to previous replies. You can get started with the free plan, but it limits how many engaged followers it will track for free. If you have a large following and a lot of conversations, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.
With these tools, you can be armed with insights on how to design your Twitter strategy to boost engagement.
