August 7, 2018

6.4 : Accessing data from Twitter

6.4 : Accessing data from Twitter

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Twitter, as opposed to Google or Facebook, is really about showing you the network that’s building up around your engagements.

Twitter data is particularly good at illustrating how popular your messages are with your buyer persona and in comparison to those of your competitors

It’s about the network that goes perhaps beyond your specific engagements, your own tweets, and about where people are responding positively or negatively to what you are doing. So the data that you can get from Twitter is really showing you the popular tweets, it’s showing you the popular activity that you are managing to generate through your engagements.

This is useful because you can respond and pick up on less successful tweeting activity and replace it with the type of activity that responds to your buyer persona. The advantage of Twitter analytics is also its ability to provide a comparison. You can see the types of activities your competitors are doing so that you can judge whether you are successful in relation to that competitor when you are tackling your buyer persona. This means that you can actually respond not just to the buyer persona’s own feedback but also to the competitor’s activity and their actions in a way that enables you to get more brand advocates and get one over your competitor.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

In terms of accessing data from Twitter, we don’t take a lot of data from Twitter. We look and see on the face of it, what our campaigns, what shares, what favourites, etc., our activity has.

The Candidate Ltd does not spend a lot of time on Twitter analytics

We don’t get a lot of direct job applications or CV submissions through Twitter so it doesn’t necessarily be the strongest are for us in terms of being able to log in or the need to log in and see analytics on that particular platform.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

The Twitter platform – actually it’s really, really new – only two months since we have Twitter advertising in Greece so it’s something new.

Twitter in Greece is still not widely used

Exercise

Twitter analysis

One of the benefits of Twitter is that a lot of data is publicly available and this helps an organisation to compare its performance in relation to that of its competitors.

Let’s compare the following three Twitter users:

https://twitter.com/iversity
https://twitter.com/salforduni
https://twitter.com/salfordbizsch

Which account is doing well and how are they performing?

Just looking at an account, it is not always clear how it compares with its competitors. This is where a number of tools can help.

For example, the FollowerWonk tool helps you to analyse your own and the Twitter accounts of two of your competitors:

https://moz.com/followerwonk/compare

In the case of the above comparison, you can see that FollowerWonk allocates a measure for the Social Capital [ it is called Social Authority by FollowerWonk] accumulated on Twitter by the three Twitter profiles.

You also have a specific analysis of the profiles such as:

Engagement rate in %
Average followers gained per day
Total number of tweets
Average tweets per week

The average tweets per week gives you a reasonable benchmark that could be translated into a KPI for Twitter engagement if for example, you want to compete with the same audience as these three accounts.

Here is more detailed advice on the use of FollowerWonk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyG0GwcgvRo

Additional materials

Twitter Analytics

Twitter Dashboard – (you need to login with your twitter account details) https://analytics.twitter.com/

Twitter Analytics Support https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171990?lang=en

References

Hackett, Christopher, Heinze, Aleksej and Fletcher, Gordon 2012, Twitter sentiment analysis: The case of mobile network outage , University of Salford and Fast Web Media, Salford. (Unpublished)

 http://usir.salford.ac.uk/27300/4/…

Twitter analytics tools

 http://twittertoolsbook.com/10-awe…

Want to be Retweeted? Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet in Twitter Network

 http://peterpirolli.com/Profession…

TwitterMonitor: Trend Detection over the Twitter Stream

 http://www.l2f.inesc-id.pt/~fmmb/w…

For chapter 6 relations sections, follow:

6.0 The importance of ongoing monitoring and learning from your engagement
6.1 Understanding of Social Capital and its importance case study
6.2 Accessing data in Google Analytics
6.3 Accessing data from Facebook
6.5 Using spreadsheets to analyse and populate reports
6.6 Learning from digital results
6.7 PPC report