Free Twitter Analytics Tools

In order to properly grow your Twitter followers and increase your engagement rates, you need to be able to find these numbers in the first place.

Social media marketing strategies depend on knowing and understanding this data.

Fortunately, there are a few ways you can track the data, stay on top of your profile, and properly plan for your future. And, any time you can do this for free, the sweeter it all seems.

You don’t have to pay top dollar for analytics, Twitter offers a number of free tools that can tell you everything you need to know to grow your profile to levels more like the world’s most popular influencers and brands!

How to see the exact number of your followers on Twitter

Finding your exact number of Twitter followers is relatively easy!

Simply:

1. Go to your profile page
2. Look for “followers.” It will appear below your name and Twitter bio.
3. The number beside “followers” is the number of followers you have.
4. If it is a number that isn’t exact, you can find out the exact number on your desktop. Hover over the number with your cursor and the exact total will appear.

It is also possible to find out how many followers you having using Twitter Analytics tools. Under the audience tab, you will find your followers number.

Social media platforms are strange places sometimes. People come and go, they follow and unfollow. But if you are properly engaging your Twitter followers, they are likely to stick with you for the long haul.

Knowing the exact number of Twitter followers you have is important because it allows you to not only track what’s happening with your audience but it also allows you to strategize and plan for growth.

If you don’t know your exact number of followers at a specific time, you’ll never be able to tell if your marketing strategies are working. If you’ve started to schedule tweets, for example, and you don’t know what your follower count was when you started, how can you know if those efforts have boosted engagement and grown your following?

How to track Twitter follower growth over time

Tracking Twitter growth over time is one of the best pieces of data available for understanding what is and is not working for your account.

Twitter’s analytics tools will give you an interactive timeline, showing you your follower counts for the last 30 days. Hovering over the bar for any particular day will show what the exact count was on that day.

Look for any stark changes in your followers. Do you see a marked increase on a particular day? Did you lose a bunch of followers on another?

Use these analytics to take a deeper dive into your tweets and posts from those days. Was there something you tweeted that may have drawn people to you or turned people off?

Keep track of your growth rate so you can notice any positive (or negative!) trends and manage them more effectively.

To calculate growth rate for a particular month (or whatever time frame you decide) follow this formula:

(Net New Followers ÷ Total Followers) x 100 = Follower Growth Rate

More than just using your growth numbers, social media analytics can help you track engagement and produce higher quality content that can then be delivered to your target audience.

How to determine when to tweet for maximum exposure

Sending tweets that no one sees is just a waste of your time and energy.

In order to have the most impact and grow your audience, you need to have good engagement rates. And to have good engagement rates, your tweets need to be seen!

In Twitter Analytics, under the “Tweets” tab, you can check engagement with each tweet you have sent out. Engagement includes retweets, follows, replies, favorites, and click-throughs.

You can use this data to determine when your audience interacts the most with your profile. If the tweets you are sending at 6am are similar to the ones you send at 2pm but the 6am one has little to no engagement, then you can easily conclude that your followers are not particularly active at that time of day.

To get more exposure you need to first, produce content your audience wants to see. Share relevant news stories, your own blog posts, images, videos, memes, and gifs.

Depending on your brand or business, you will want to both educate and entertain. If you give people what they want to see, they will engage with it, share it, and your audience will expand from there.

Explore trending hashtags. If you are able to work one of them into a tweet, you increase the chances that people will discover your tweet. Popular hashtags bring people together around a particular subject or event. Join the party and people will then join you!

It’s also a good idea to create your own hashtag related to your brand or business. Include this hashtag in all of your tweets and encourage your followers to do the same. This is one way you can start your own Twitter community in a wider sense and even encourage some user-generated content. If you own a cafe, for example, have a contest or run a promotion that provides a discount to anyone who tweets a picture of their coffee or perfect cappuccino, tags your profile and uses your hashtag.

People love to be involved and feel acknowledged so when they post content about you, their followers will see it. Their followers may then also become your followers.

Schedule your tweets to go out when your audience is most active and you get the highest level of engagement. The more engagement you get from your followers, the more likely it is that other people will see the tweet as well. And, as this snowballs, there’s a chance -- if your content is on point! -- that your tweet could go viral!

Promoted tweets are basically Twitter ads. If you choose to promote a tweet, it will be shown to a much wider number of people. It is a set on a pay-per-click type system so you’ll only pay for a promoted tweet when someone favorites, retweets, clicks or replies to it. Promoted tweets are a great option when you have a piece of content that you want to be seen on a large scale. Giveaways, contents, and promotions are perfect candidates for promoted tweets!

Free tools for mentions and monitoring your followers

When it comes to monitoring your followers and mentions, Twitter Analytics is one of the best options.

The audience tab will tell you everything you need to know about the demographics of your followers. It will break things down by consumer behavior, lifestyle, age, gender, location. Everything you will need to fine-tune your tweets and curate your content.

You can also use the tool to track all of your mentions and profile visits for the last 28 days or on a month by month basis.

Other tools are available but to get the most out of them, it is likely that you will have to pay. The biggest benefit many of these tools offer is the ability to schedule tweets. BUT, soon, you may be able to do that on Twitter itself. Currently, Twitter is testing scheduling on some profiles and it is a feature that may be added in 2020.

Depending on exactly what your marketing goals are, you may need to use a different tool but as far as we are concerned, Twitter Analytics is the best free option available.

Growing your social media profiles takes time and dedication. But, if you tap into Twitter Analytics tools, you can harness the power of the platform to meet your marketing and revenue goals! By tracking follower behavior, growth rates, and engagement, the sky’s the limit!