Sep
15
How to Use Twitter Graph Checker to Monitor Account Performance
Let's talk about the experience of using a platform like Twitter. It is an absolute and a total firehose of information. You are in there every day, you are tweeting, you are replying, and you are sharing interesting links. You will occasionally glance up at your profile, and you will see your follower count go up a little bit, or maybe, on a bad day, you will see it go down. But what does it all really mean?
Looking at your total follower count today is just a single, static, and an almost meaningless snapshot in time. It doesn't tell you the real story of your account. Are you actually growing faster this month than you were last month? Did that big and that viral tweet that you sent out yesterday actually bring you any new, loyal, and long-term followers, or was it just a temporary and a fleeting flash in the pan?
To be able to truly and to deeply understand your performance on a platform as dynamic as Twitter, you can't just look at today's numbers. You need to be able to see the trend. You need to be able to see the story of your account's journey over time. You need to be able to see the graph. So how do you get this beautiful and this insightful, visual story of your account's growth over time? You use a special tool that can automatically track your performance for you, day by day, and that can plot it all out on a simple and an easy-to-read chart.
The Story of Your Growth: Why a Graph is Worth a Thousand Numbers
Before we get into the easy "how," let's just take a moment to appreciate the powerful "why." Why is being able to see your data in a graph so much more powerful than just looking at a spreadsheet full of numbers?
Imagine for a moment that you had a spreadsheet, and in that spreadsheet, you had the daily follower count for your Twitter account for the last 365 days. It would just be a long and a very boring, wall of numbers. It would be incredibly difficult for you to be able to spot any kind of a meaningful pattern or a trend in that data.
A simple, line graph, on the other hand, tells you a rich and a detailed story, in an instant. You can immediately and you can visually see all of the peaks and all of the valleys in your growth. You can spot the exact, specific day when you had a massive and a sudden surge in new followers, or you can see the long and the frustrating week when your growth completely and totally stalled. The best analogy is to think of it like the difference between you trying to read a long and a very boring, financial report that is full of numbers and you looking at a simple, a clean, and a powerful, stock chart. The chart is the thing that tells you the story of your growth or of your decline, in one, single, and powerful image.
The Metrics That Matter: What Should You Be Tracking?
So, what are the key and the important performance indicators, or KPIs, for a Twitter account that a good and a useful tool should be able to track for you over time?
The most basic and, in many ways, the most important one of all, of course, is your Follower Growth. This is the top-of-the-funnel metric. Is your potential audience actually getting bigger and bigger over time? This is the clearest and the most direct signal of your account's growing reach and of its influence.
But just having a big follower count is not enough. You also need to be tracking your Engagement Rate. This is a crucial and a very important, "health" metric. It is not just about how many followers you have; it is about how many of those followers are actually and actively interacting with your tweets. Are they liking your content? Are they retweeting it to their own followers? And are they taking the time to be able to write a reply? A high engagement rate is a sign that you have an active and an interested community, not just a big and a passive number. And finally, it can also be useful to be able to track your Tweet Frequency. How often are you actually posting? And are there any clear and obvious correlations between your posting frequency and the rate of your follower growth?
The Manual Method: An Impossible and Depressing Task
So, for a moment, let's just imagine that you had to try and track all of this important and of this valuable data, by hand. How would you even begin to do it?
Well, the process would be a slow, a tedious, and an almost completely impossible one. You would have to log in to your Twitter account, every single day, and ideally, at the exact same time every day. You would then have to write down your exact, and your up-to-the-minute, follower count in a massive and a very complex spreadsheet. You would then have to go through all of your recent tweets and you would have to manually count up all of the likes, all of the replies, and all of the retweets. And then, after all of that hard work, you would have to go and you would have to manually create all of your own charts in a program like Microsoft Excel. As you can probably tell, absolutely no one has the time or the discipline to be able to do this. It is a completely and a totally impractical and an unsustainable process.
The Automated Historian: How a Tracking Tool Works
This is where a modern, an elegant, and an incredibly simple online tool comes in to save the day, acting as your own, personal, and automated historian for your Twitter account. The way that these tools work is actually very clever. They use the official and the public, Twitter API.
You will usually just have to authorize the tool to be able to access your account's public data. The tool's powerful servers will then, on a regular and on a consistent schedule, which is usually every single day, "ping" the Twitter API and it will ask it for your latest and your most up-to-date stats. It will ask the simple questions: "What is the total follower count for the account @MyBrandLK today? And how many total tweets have they posted?"
It will then take this new, daily data point and it will save it in its own, powerful database. Over a period of time, it will build up a rich and a detailed, historical record of your account's day-by-day performance. It will then use all of this wonderful, historical data to be able to automatically generate all of the beautiful and all of the insightful graphs that you will then see on your own, personal dashboard.
The Power of an Online Twitter Graph Checker
This pressing need for a simple, for an automated, and for a completely visual way to be able to see our performance over a period of time is exactly why a Twitter Graph Checker is such a powerful and such an essential tool for any modern and for any serious, social media manager.
This type of tool is a historical, analytics dashboard. Its one, and only, job is to be able to take the chaotic, the messy, and the real-time stream of the Twitter platform and to be able to turn it into a clear, a simple, and an easy-to-understand story of your account's growth and of its engagement. The real and the true power of one of these tools is not in the simple, one-time check of your follower count. It is in its ability to be able to show you the important and the meaningful trends over time. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of powerful and insightful tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can start to track all of your progress and you can start to gain all of these valuable and important insights, completely for free.
What to Look For in a Great Twitter Analytics Tool
As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most useful ones are designed to give you a clear and an actionable, visual report of your account's performance. They are built to be your on-demand, command center for your Twitter strategy. A really top-notch online tool for tracking your Twitter stats should have a few key features. It should include:
- A clean, a simple, and an incredibly intuitive dashboard that has very clear and very easy-to-read graphs for all of the key and the important metrics, such as your Follower Growth and your Engagement Rate.
- The fantastic and the incredibly powerful ability for you to be able to track not just your own, personal account, but also the accounts of all of your top competitors, which is absolutely crucial for any kind of a competitive analysis.
- The important functionality to be able to set a custom and a specific date range, so that you can see your performance over the last week, over the last month, or over the last year.
- A great feature that might even be able to show you all of your "top tweets" for a given period, which will allow you to be able to easily and quickly identify all of your most successful and of your most engaging content.
- A tool that is reliable, that updates its data on a regular basis, and that has a very clear and a very transparent privacy policy.
A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern and for any serious, social media marketer.
The Human Analyst: From a Graph to a Winning Strategy
Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple and a beautiful, data report into a real and a winning, content strategy. The online tool has done its job. It has given you the graph. Now, your job is to be the human strategist and to be able to find the story that is hidden in that data.
You should identify all of the spikes in your follower growth graph. Do you see a big and a sudden, upward spike on a particular day? You should go and you should look at what you tweeted on that day. Was it a funny and a relatable video? Was it a controversial and a thought-provoking opinion? Or was it a simple, but an engaging, poll that got a lot of a response? That is a massive and an invaluable clue about what your audience truly and deeply responds to.
You should also diagnose all of the plateaus. Is your growth completely flat? You should look at your tweet frequency and at your engagement rate for that specific period. Were you posting less often than usual? Was the content that you were posting during that time not getting very many replies or not getting very many retweets? The graph is the thing that shows you the "what"; you are the one who has to dig in and to find the "why."
From a Messy Feed to a Clear Story of Growth
Let’s be honest, to be able to succeed on a platform as noisy and as competitive as Twitter, you cannot just post randomly and then hope for the best. You need to be able to track your performance, you need to be able to understand the trends, and you need to be able to make smart and data-driven decisions. A graph-based checker is the most powerful and the most intuitive way for you to be able to see the true and the real story of your account's performance over time.
So, it's time to stop just guessing if your Twitter strategy is actually working. It is time to look at the data. By using a simple online tool to be able to track your performance, you can move from a world of confusing and of disconnected, daily numbers to a clear and an actionable story of your account's growth. It’s time to understand your audience, it’s time to learn from your successes, and it’s time to build a Twitter presence that is designed not just to post, but to grow.
