Does anyone actually see your tweets?

Twitter has updated its Twitter Analytics and opened it to everyone (go here and see what your tweets have been up to http://analytics.twitter.com).

It previously used to look like this, and it now gives you information on the number of people who've apparently seen the tweet, the number of people who've clicked on it to see it in full and the number of people who've interacted with it (favourited, replied, followed you etc - there's a list of the available metric options at the end).

For the last few years I've shared all my Blogger and Google Analytics info for this particular blog (Blogger overestimates things threefold so while it says on the right that this blog has had 1.4m views at time of writing, assume it's one third of that!) and I thought curious people might like to know what my tweet's have been up to.

Here's some sort of overview (screencaptured from a couple of weeks ago).




Tweets that are posted when lots of people are online will obviously be seen more than tweets that are posted when fewer people are online (eg 3.15am on a Tuesday morning) but tweets posted at a 'busy' time may have to compete with other fascinating tweets.

The new analytics hasn't really told me anything I didn't already know. For me (and it may be different for others of course) posting a link on Twitter to this blog results in relatively few hits - over 80% (probably 90%) of my traffic comes from Google searches. One way around that of course (and one of several methods used by better and more popular bloggers) is to repost the same link throughout the day while slightly varying the 'wrapper' tweet that accompanies it. Remember that someone might not see your tweet from 10 minutes ago but might see the one you post now. Another good way of re-promoting your link is to acknowledge that you're doing this by saying "for the afternoon crowd" or "in case you missed it" (aka ICYMI).

According to Twitter analytics each of my tweets is seen by between roughly 180 and 350 people at any average time, typically about 250 see them - there's a huge variance as you can see below. There are some outliers that become very popular (into the thousands and several thousands) and some that are less so. Clearly if a tweet is retweeted this increases its number - but it's important to remember that the figure for a tweet's views are always going to be much lower than the number of people that follow you because they won't always be online at the same time.

(Note picture below is not a continuous run of tweets but a selection)
 

Above and below are a couple of edited screenshots showing some popular tweets and some less popular tweets. In each case the number of people who see it is always more than the number of people who do anything with it (in some case no-one clicks on a link, *tiny violins*).

I am extremely pleased to see that the guidance for people wanting to report misleading homeopathy websites did reasonably well with over 200 'engagements', although poor old 'pet dinosaur' which only had 28 views. The FoodBabe tweet was retweeted by a few others so is about three to four times more popular than my other tweets.  

The following are fairly typical...

Sometimes a tweet's "success" surprises me, in both directions, for example I can't understand why the one below has had over 3,500 views - it was retweeted a couple of times but it's fairly niche. I suppose it was published on a Tuesday afternoon so possibly a lot of people are online then!

Similarly this next one took me by surprise - it was retweeted 12 times (what?!) and over 600 people clicked on the photo. There's not even an informative link from which to find out more information, I'd have expected this one to be pretty minor.

I sent what I thought was a better tweet, with a proper link, but it wasn't nearly as viewed as the one from the day before. I suppose the main difference is that the first one I sent was 'first', but also quirkier than the second slightly duller and more factual one. It might have done even worse had I not hashtagged it pretty well.

If I send a tweet to another person (tweets which start with the @-mention format, so they are sent to someone rather than just ccing them into a tweet) this means the number of people who see the tweet drops considerably.  

The number of views can be as low as 7 but tend to be around 30 to 50. This is because only the people who follow both me and the person I'm talking to will see it (unless someone looks at my profile, or searches the other person's mentions). I did once send a tweet to a well-known singer ("haha" I said) and that got over 900 views but I certainly can't take any credit for that.

I suppose if you want to send a tweet to someone but want to make sure it's seen by others it's a good idea to use the .@ format (where you 'break' the To function of the unadorned @ at the start of a message) or just be more popular on Twitter than me and the people I talk to ;-)

Now of course I shall share this post on Twitter (on a Sunday morning as well - no-one will see it, haha) but I wonder if you'll have come across it via another route... and if you want to tell me please do so in the comments, thanks :)

Further reading

• Twitter's experimenting with showing how many people saw your tweets (21 March 2014) The Verge
• (Almost) no-one is reading your tweets (13 December 2013) AllThingsD
  That post is not about Twitter analytics but the fact that the 'average' Twitter account has 61 followers so - for most people on Twitter - hardly anyone is paying attention. When you sign up to Twitter as a new user it seems to encourage you to follow celebrities, who often tend to broadcast rather than engage, and brands (who do engage a bit more) so it might be giving people a rather strange overview of the service:

"Twitter’s official messaging still promotes the idea that you, ordinary you, can find your voice on Twitter — its newly tweaked welcome screen invites new users to “start a conversation.” But Twitter’s business plan — based on its “asymmetric follow model” — assumes that you and Twitter’s other 230 million users will spend almost all of your time reading about the conversation, not leading it.

Check out Twitter’s onboarding sequence for new users, for instance, which is dedicated to helping you “find and follow well-known people.” (Twitter seems particularly interested, by the way, in helping you find Neil Patrick Harris.)" 

Below are the 'key metrics' that Twitter analytics offers everyone - you can see these when you click on the tweet on the analytics page.

Impressions
Number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter

Embedded media clicks
Clicks to view a photo or video in the Tweet

Detail expands
Number of times users clicked on the Tweet to view more details

Link clicks
Clicks on a URL or Card in the Tweet

User profile clicks
Clicks on the name, @handle, or profile photo of the Tweet author

Retweets
Number of times users retweeted the Tweet to their followers

Favorites
Number of times users favorited the Tweet

Hashtag clicks
Clicks on hashtag(s) in the Tweet

Replies
Number of replies to the Tweet

Follows
Number of times users followed you directly from the Tweet

Permalink clicks
Clicks on the Tweet permalink (desktop only)

Shared via email
Number of times users emailed the Tweet to someone

Twitter kind of tells you if someone hasn't clicked on a link... which is a little bit creepy

My blog is a bit like Hugh Grant's character in About a Boy. I once wrote a post that was unusually popular (typically it was rustled up quite quickly as a minor observation about blocking on Twitter) and thanks to that my blog scores mildly higher in Google's esteem than it might otherwise. The post views are very 'long tail' with one vastly popular post, two or three tolerably well-viewed and everything else languishing ;)

I've also learned, from Google Analytics, that almost all of my traffic comes from Google searches and relatively little from Twitter. In fact I probably only post to Twitter between a third / half of the posts that I write as it doesn't make a huge deal of difference. Obviously I'll post this one to Twitter but chances are you'll have come across this by some other means.

Twitter Analytics has also confirmed this and links to my blog typically get somewhere between 0 and 20 hits with a few outliers that get more clicks (the one on catching a camera going off mid-flash did quite well) and even my most popular post on this blog doesn't do particularly well if shared on Twitter.

What I was surprised to notice though was that Twitter Analytics tells you if a link has had zero clicks and, of course, if you have sent the link to someone this rather suggests that they've not clicked on it.

I find that a tiny bit troubling: surely it's everyone's right to click or not click on links that people send without the sender being indirectly informed. Troubling's too strong a word perhaps.

There are several ways that a link might get clicked on
a) you send it to someone who sees it and clicks
b) you send it to someone and someone else following both of you sees it and clicks
c) someone looking at your timeline sees it and clicks
d) someone searching Twitter for a keyword sees the tweet and clicks

But if it's had 0 clicks (and was sent to someone) then it's reasonable to assume that they've not clicked on it (though they may recognise the URL and have previously seen it). This rather makes me want to click on every link every sent to me to avoid giving offence ;-)

Don't forget that if a link in an URL says it's been clicked once you've no idea of course who clicked it and if it was the person you've sent it to. In terms of privacy I think this is preferable, and a bit of me think that all Twitter Analytics links should report all links as having had '1 click'.

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Anyway here are the links in my tweets that were clicked on a fair bit. Since the images are all wider than the blog window permits I'm afraid you'll have to click on them to enlarge.

175 clicks for a rather good comment pointing out that Ben Goldacre's a bit of a genius :)

124 clicks for David Arnold's concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 6 July - film music (Stargate, Independence Day, Bond films) and TV music (Sherlock) stuff, yippee :)

Note the two tweets which demonstrate that the number of clicks shown is cumulative. Were I to tweet that link now it would already be at 124 and any further increase in clicks would be added to all the tweets where this link appears, ie it's a total number.

I think it would be much more useful to know that a tweet sent at 10am garnered more clicks than one sent at 3pm rather than just giving a total. There are services (probably not free) that offer this sort of insight, probably businesses use it to find out when best to engage with their audience and not spammily annoy them.




50 clicks for this interesting post from my friend Guy on a most unpleasant situation that I was unfortunately involved in and very glad to see that it seems to be the end of it.





0 clicks. Here's a tweet I sent to myself (it's actually visible to ALL of my followers because they follow both me and the person ('me') to whom I sent the tweet). I sent it and then immediately captured this image from Twitter analytics before it was clicked on. Then I clicked on it (on my phone) and a few minutes later it showed that someone had clicked on it (doesn't prove it was me of course).

Twitter Analytics - quite fun

Edit: 29 March 2014 - I'm not sure if the number of clicks reflects people clicking on it from my tweet or just the total (across all of Twitter) number of clicks regardless of who's shared the link. I had a look at my analytics yesterday and saw that a link I'd tweeted a few days ago was now up at 200+ clicks but that increase can't have come from my tweet which is now buried further down my timeline.

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Yesterday I discovered that Twitter Analytics exist and are free, and a bit fascinating.

To play along, be logged into Twitter then go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ - you can see how often people have clicked on links and there's a record of the number of favourites, retweets and replies.

When I had a look through I spotted that a link I'd posted a few days ago to a concert in July I'm bonkersly excited about (David Arnold: live in concert = film music!) had been clicked 30 times. I've sinced tweeted it again and it's now gone up to 72 thanks to more retweets.

I've actually tweeted the link a few times since Feburary and would have expected each tweet to have a different number by it, depending on how many clicks it gets for a particular tweet, eg 15 click for the first tweet, another 10 for the second, 20 for the third and so on - but each of them now displays '72 clicks' - so the number of clicks for any given tweet isn't available, as you can see below.

Click to embiggen any of the pictures to see them a bit more clearly

The pic above doesn't mean that the link was clicked 72 times for both tweets (144 clicks) but 72 overall.

It's entirely possible that no-one clicked the link from this tweet as I wasn't actually 'sharing a link' as such, more asking possibly-nerdier followers to see if they knew what the glitch was (since fixed).

I'd have thought the more honest, and truthful, thing would be for the number of clicks to reflect how many came from a particular tweet as it would seem that that would be more useful (eg telling you that more people click through at 10am on Monday morning than they do at 10am on Thursday morning or whatever).

Still, it's quite fun.

Apparently Twitter is also telling some users (using the iOS Twitter app) how many people have viewed their tweet too (hat tip @simonhowes).