Tracking analytics on Twitter is incredibly easy to do and something that every single company/brand on the social media platform will do.
It isn’t solely accessible for businesses, though, with each and every Twitter user having the ability to track key analytics such as impressions, mentions, profile visits and more.
While the majority of the data covered via Twitter’s analytics tool is self explanatory, impressions is something that not many people know about.
In this article, we are going to cover what impressions are, why they are important and how you can go about keeping up to date with your key Twitter analytics
What does impressions mean on Twitter? In a nutshell
The total number of impressions you gain on a tweet essentially means the amount of times your tweet has been viewed by others.
Other users don’t have to have interacted with your tweet(s) in terms of replying, retweets or liking, they simply have to have seen the tweet.
This obviously takes into consideration your followers who will naturally see your tweets, but it also takes into account people who have seen your tweet who don’t follow you.
This is typically through term searches or through your tweet appearing on their timeline due to you having mutual followers who have engaged with the tweet.
Typically, tweets which use trending terms or hashtags will gain large impressions, as will tweets that are replying to someone with a huge following.
This is because if something is trending then all tweets containing that trend are easily accessible via the trending tab and if someone has a large following then your replies are essentially playing to that following.
Considerations when it comes to impressions
One thing worth noting when it comes to impressions is that if your tweet has been seen via a third party social media management platform such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, then this will not count towards your total number of impressions.
Only when your tweet has been seen via the official Twitter website and/or app will it count towards your total number of impressions.
Another factor to consider is the level of privacy on your account, which can have a massive effect on your Tweet impressions.
Your total number of impressions will be significantly lower if your account is set to private because this means that the only people who can see your tweets will be your followers.
It will be impossible for you to gain impressions outside of this circle, so be sure to make your account public if you want more post impressions and more Twitter followers.
Why impressions are important
For your every day Twitter user, impressions aren’t really important beyond ego. However, for companies and for social media influencers, they are massively important.
This is because for influencers and companies, the more people who see their tweets, the more business opportunities present themselves.
To cut a long story short, influencers reaching more people means they can ask for more money from companies to advertise their products and companies.
And, reaching more people means more they have a greater chance of making more sales and therefore making more money.
As a result, many influencers and businesses elect to pay for ‘promoted’ tweets. These are tweets which show up as ads on relevant timelines, ensuring that their target audiences are being reached more regularly.
Visit the analytics page (we explain how to below), and select ‘get started’ underneath the ‘advertise on Twitter’ heading if you are interested in paying for promoted tweets.
How to check your impressions and other analytics
To gain a better understanding of your account’s analytics, users will need to know how to check their analytics to be able to establish whether their tweets are gaining a large amount of impressions or not.
There are third party websites which will do this for you, however, the easiest and best way to find out your Twitter impressions is via the Twitter website.
In order to check how many impressions your tweets are getting, please take the following steps:
- Log on to your Twitter account via a web browser.
- Select the the three dotted icon located at the bottom of the menu bar on the left hand side.
- Select the ‘analytics ‘tab.
Once you’re on this page you will have full access to a variety of different analytics.
In relation to impressions, you are able to see data relating to which tweet of yours gained the most impressions, which tweet with media has gained the most impressions, and your overall total of impressions on a month by month basis.
If you are interested in other analytics besides impressions, then you will be able to explore this page in greater detail to find out even more about how your tweets are performing.
Conclusion
To conclude, the best way to look at ‘impressions’ on Twitter is to consider them as ‘views’ because essentially, that is what they are – how many views your tweets have gained.
Remember that you won’t be able to see the impressions on archive deleted tweets. That means not all tweets will show up in your report.
We hope that the information provided in this article has helped to explain what they are in greater detail, and also given you the knowledge base to go and explore the analytics side of Twitter.
