Tuesday, July 13, 2021
The days of carefree Tweeting, at least for brands, is over. For several years, social media marketing has been an arms race with everyone chasing customer eyeballs. And for social media managers, it’s often tough to know which Tweets are resonating with your audience. Engagements, of course, are a major clue on what works and what doesn’t. But the other indicator is top Tweets. These might not get a huge engagement percentage, but they’re making a large number of impressions.
Unfortunately, you might not know how to find my top Tweets. These are a subset of your statistics within the Twitter account. In addition, there are independent Twitter tools that help you find out what works, not just for you, but for your competitors.
Even the best-planned Tweets can go wrong, and likewise, there are hidden gems just around the corner. Despite the overall “arms race,” spontaneous successes and failures can reveal unexpected trends. These give you opportunities for improvement. At the same time, if something falls flat it can reveal problems that you weren’t aware of. Problems can reflect on some aspect of your company, or they can show the need for adjustments in your social media strategy.
In a nutshell, you should know how to find my top Tweets if you want to improve your tweeting strategies. Checking them will let you see what tweets /content / subject matter best resonate with your audience. For instance, you might find that your audience loves it when your Tweets show a sense of humor. Life can be stressful, and humor in Tweets can relieve stress and make your brand memorable.
Let’s look at this another way. For months now, social media has been buzzing about the lawyer whose Zoom presence in court was dominated by a cat filter. There have been so many variations of this theme, and all of them have celebrated the humor in this everyday mishap. However, some of these jokes have fallen flat. And in the future the overall theme may get too old to be funny.
Another reason you need to know how to find my top tweets is that your top posts can become evergreen Tweets. As I’ve said before in my evergreen Tweets post, you can’t repeat Tweets in exactly the same form these days. But even at that, there are strategies for reuse. If something you said in a top Tweet strikes a chord with your audience, then you have a great opportunity for reuse.
Another way you can find evergreen Tweet opportunities with top Tweets is through finding out what worries people. For example, in the early days of the pandemic everyone was buying disinfectant (seemingly) by the gallon. Within a matter of weeks, very dirty places became almost spotless. For a company that sells household and commercial cleaning chemicals, the cleaning trend on Twitter would’ve been instructive. Of course, cleanliness will likely remain an important trend here in America.
Of course, an evergreen-worthy Tweet isn’t the only measure of Twitter success. Rather, applying how to find my top tweets helps you know which hashtags are working the best. If your brand has a custom hashtag, then this isn’t the one you’re looking at. Here, the most important thing is targeting. Different hashtags reach people who are looking for specific things. If the tags and your intended audience match, then you have a winner. If not, you might fine tune your strategy.
On the other side of the coin, you might find that hashtags you’re using are ineffective. Maybe people aren’t interested in the topic (you can find this out with keyword research or social listening). Or, it could be that your brand doesn’t resonate with people looking at a particular topic. Once again, a modification of your strategy might be in order.
When people think about measuring the success of individual Tweets, they usually think about checking Twitter analytics first. This isn’t surprising, since this is something that you get free of charge. Plus, it’s already part of the platform. Here, you’re learning to maximize what’s already available to you and use it to your advantage. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about compatibility or terms of service problems. Here’s how to do it.
First, login to twitter.com with the account you want to analyze. Then, go to the “More” at the bottom left of your profile and choose “Analytics.” From here, you can see all of the different analytics features that are available to you on Twitter. Over time, you’ll learn to use each of them.
Next, select Tweets at the top menu. Here, you will see analytic data on a variety of Tweets. You can select historical data, both short-term and long-term. Used differently, you can see trends from the Tweets menu.
Select your date range, and Twitter will now show you your top tweets in terms of impressions. This is your default statistic in Twitter, especially since so many marketers focus on impressions. However, for other functions it’s important to know what Tweets get Retweeted or otherwise shared.
Finally, if you want to rank your top tweets by retweets, link clicks, etc., simply select export date at the top right and you will get a detailed spreadsheet with every metric you could ask for that is sortable. However, please note that export only works for default time periods.
Do you want to look in on your competitors? For many of us, knoqwing what works for other companies and brands is a big help in shaping our own Twitter strategy. This is especially true if the other side is gaining market share at our expense. However, Twitter Analytics only works with your own tweets. There are, however, ways to track them in other ways using Twitter search.
First, go to Twitter search and enter a search like this: from:nealschaffer min_retweets:10. Here “nealschaffer” is the account name, “retweets” is the metric you are looking for (favorites would be “faves”), and “10” being the minimum threshold. Then, you’ll get a report on which of that user’s Tweets have gained the most attention. With Retweets, of course, you’re looking for posts that people love to share with others. But sometimes favorites is a useful metric, too.
Keep in mind, Twitter search isn’t the only way to do this. If you want more specific information, you can also use Twitter Advanced Search (https://twitter.com/search-advanced) to do the same. For instance, you might want to see what hashtags are trending for another user. This can be very useful if a particular aspect of your industry is going through lots of changes. Or, it might help you plan the next product announcement.
Using Twitter analytics isn’t the only answer to how to find my top Tweets. In fact, there are a few tools out there worth mentioning that can also give you data regarding the popularity of your tweets. This information might come in handy for many planning and intelligence reasons.
SocialBearing is the most comprehensive of these tools, returning the latest 3,200 tweets and allowing you to sort the top tweets by retweets, favorites, engagements, engagement rates, followers, reach, ReTweets per minute, and sentiment. Besides being comprehensive, this service is a Twitter specialist: it only works on the Twitter platform. To access it, you’ll sign into your Twitter account.
For the free version, you can get comprehensive data for the last week before your query. This means that as a free tool, SocialBearing is great for identifying short-term trends and opportunities. For instance, if there are fast-moving changes in your industry this can be highly instructive with an almost real time perspective. However, for more time-comprehensive monitoring you’ll need to check in weekly and collate data.
Besides basic information, SocialBearing also offers unique functionality such as word cloud, hashtag cloud, top domains shared, and a host of other analytical data. Most of this is available for free within the 7-day timeframe. However, if you’re willing to pay for a subscription, you can get historical data all the way back to 2006. Depending on your brand and its goals, this is very valuable.
According to their website, Followfly was designed to help Twitter users see their best Tweets way back when you could only see the most recent Tweets first. This made it very difficult to see what your followers and competitors were doing. It also complicated many aspects of Twitter-based market research. Fortunately, FollowFly provides a simpler user interface which allows you to order tweets by the most Retweets or Likes from the last week, month, or year.
Probably the best feature of FollowFly is that it is easy to use. Simply link your Twitter account, and they’ll analyze your Tweets from the last year. In addition, you can type in any other Twitter username and see their top Tweets. So, if you only want a quick snapshot, this is also a good solution on how to find my top tweets. Sometimes the simplest solutions really are the best.
It almost goes without saying that part of how to find my top Tweets is tracking hashtags. After all, hashtags are one of the most important ways that people find Tweets on the subjects that they care about. Choosing the right Tweets helps the right people find you, but it also helps you find the right people. For instance, hashtag tarcking is one of the most powerful analytics tools on Twitter. You might even find a great influencer! With that in mind, let’s look at TrackMyHashtag.
This AI-based tool tracks hashtags, and even looks at potential influencers. It looks promising in the functionality for the paid account, but the free version only allows you to access data from the last 100 tweets of an account. Nonetheless, if you want to take a peek at how a hashtag is doing, they’ll let you do it for free. Historical data is available for premium customers, and all paid accounts get information on their competition.
Keeping track of your top Tweets is common sense, once you realize the value of doing so. But in order to do this, you’ll need to know how to find my top Tweets. Tracking is easy with Twitter analytics, but you can also use some outside tools to help you. Especially combined with your other social listening and analytics software, you can get a lot of valuable insights.
Hero photo by Jeremy Zero on Unsplash