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For many entrepreneurs, social media is a double-edged sword. While platforms like X (or Twitter) offer the potential for valuable connections, insights and entertainment, they also become a significant distraction and time sink for many of us.
For professionals, you want to make sure that the content you’re posting is benefitting users and amplifying your social media presence. But finding ways to quantify that and using that to make decisions moving forward may not be obvious.
Anyone who has grappled with these challenges needs tools to ensure that their time spent on X is beneficial to their life and business. Having high-quality metrics can allow you to consistently evaluate your audience’s engagement with that content.
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Why track the value of X?
We all know that social media in general and X in particular gives you the ability to present content to millions of people. But getting value out of X requires a strategy. Tracking the performance and behavioral metrics of my X account can give me actionable data about the reach of my X content and the level of engagement from both my followers and X’s users in general.
Tracking X’s value can also increase the visibility of your business and brand by giving you metrics you can use to increase the number of followers to your feed, which can also help you drive those followers to your other channels, be it a website or other social channels.
Analyzing the X metrics of your audience, like trending hashtags, can help you stay up to date on trends you can leverage to drive traffic to your X presence. Finally, learning who the users are who are also leveraging X effectively can lead you to influencers in your industry who can help boost your brand.
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Best metrics you can use to track the value of X
Metrics are important because they can take questions like “How popular is the information I’m putting on X?” or “Am I putting too much or not enough content on my feed?” and give you numeric values you can use for making decisions. Some of these metrics are easily available. Some require a deeper dive or use of X’s Analytics suite to find.
Gaining followers
The total number of followers an account has is an almost ubiquitous statistic. Every time you hear about a celebrity in an entertainment-related story, the number of social media followers they have often follows.
If I have a quick spike in followers, that can mean an individual tweet resonated with my audience, while a slow steady rise in followers may mean that my content has broad appeal and that the content is being shared with others.
Link clicks
Link click metrics measure the number of times users click on the URLs found in your tweets. If you supply links to external content regularly in your tweets, this is another metric that is very useful in gauging what content resonates with users.
This can also be useful when you are trying to drive traffic to your own website. Correlating link clicks from X as well as other channels (Facebook, email, etc.) with how long users stay engaged with the content on your website can help determine which channels drive the most traffic to your site.
Conversion rate
Conversions evaluate the impact of a post on a user’s action. That action could be going to a website to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter or download a file. Metrics like these can also help identify areas that could be improved. For example, if a post drives traffic to a form, but users don’t fill it out or abandon it before hitting submit, then the posts are effective, but the form may need some optimizing.
Engagement
Engagement rate requires a little math to calculate. The engagement rate measures the impact of your posts by dividing the total number of engagements (comments, reposts, likes, etc.) by the number of views. A higher engagement rate indicates that your content triggers a reaction from your audience. A lower engagement rate can mean they read your posts and then move on.
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Impressions
If your post shows up in someone else’s timeline, that’s an impression. Two important things to note about impressions: They do not necessarily imply interaction with the post as simply viewing a post counts as an impression. Also, multiple views from the same user count as multiple impressions.
Reach
Unlike impressions, reach counts unique views from different users. If one user sees one of my posts seven times and another user sees it twice, my reach will be shown as two.
Think of impressions as a view of how many times your posts are being shown to users. By contrast, reach shows how many people you’re reaching. Both metrics combined can give you a better understanding of how your X strategy is working.
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Why does this matter long-term?
Having a decision-making strategy built around X metrics can benefit your business in several ways, beyond just increasing the number of followers you have.
1. You can evaluate long-term performance
Identifying the posts that perform well over time can single out content that your audience identifies with. Supplying your audience with similar content in the future can optimize your X stream with more consistently high-value content.
2. It helps you understand your audience
X’s analytics suite provides more about your audience than just their username. You can gain information about followers’ interests, geographic location, what language they speak and the time of day their activity level is at its peak. When you cater your content to the preferences of your audience, it leads to more frequent and more positive engagement.
3. You gain better control of your content strategy
Quality content isn’t just a question of what to post. When to post and how frequently are also considerations as X feeds update constantly. You want to make sure you post quality content when your audience is most active on X.
If you don’t post enough content, users may look elsewhere for content they want or simply be shown someone else’s material. If you post too much you may saturate your audience with noise that will also drive them to other feeds. Analyzing engagement will show when your users are most active and craving your content. Concentrate on posting at these times.
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Increasing value over time
As you use X strategically, you may notice that the percentage of valuable experiences on the platform grows over time. By refining your feed and analyzing your audience’s interactions with your content, you can increase the value your audience and your business derive from X.
As you refine your analysis, your X network expands, exposing you to an ever-growing pool of knowledge and opportunities. This snowball effect of value demonstrates that strategic use of X metrics could become increasingly beneficial for you and your company.
Google I/O 2024 on May 14, 2024. (Photo by Christoph Dernbach/picture alliance via Getty Images)
