How Financial Advisors Can Use Twitter Analytics To Produce Better Content: Part 2

So, you’ve been publishing content consistently now for a month or more. One technique I’ve used to determine the kind of content our marketing team should be focused on curating is by looking at the engagement of all of our tweets over the course of a 2-3 month time span (honestly, there’s no science behind that number, but after 2 months of data collection, we felt that was a large enough sample size). Here is a step by step guide on how to get the information we use to inform our content strategy. After you log into Twitter Analytics you can choose the time frame for which you would like to view and collect your data.

1. Select a 2 or 3 month time range. Be sure to hit the “update” button.
2. Beside the range “button” there is an “Export Data” button. Click on that button, wait a few seconds, and a spreadsheet will automatically download onto your computer. The name of the file will be tweet_activity_metrics.csv.
3. Open the spreadsheet with your favourite spreadsheet tool (NOTE: I will be using Microsoft Excel to provide you with the next steps so be sure to use the equivalent features in your spreadsheet tool). There will be a number of different columns preset
4.  Sort by Engagements from highest to lowest (if you have no engagements, sort by impressions) and pull out the first 10-15 rows of each.\
   1. Impressions typically indicates the visibility a piece of content receives through a keyword, a hashtag, or perhaps some kind of attribution to another Twitter user.
   2. Engagement indicates to me the content I posted that drove a user to like, share, re-tweet, click, etc. Engagement is a source of truth of the quality of your data. 1000 users can see your tweet, but if no one clicks on it or interacts with it, chances are the content or the words you used were not enough for someone to spend the few seconds to even look at the page.
5. Examine the Tweets and try to answer the following questions:
   1. Do you notice a trend across the Tweets with respect to a particular topic and subject matter?
      1. Certain subject areas might gain more attention as a result of the audience you have who are following you. Not everything you share is relevant to your audience. Write down the subject areas you feel received the most engagement and ensure you are writing down a single subject area.
      2. Are you listing statistics or quantifiable comparisons or metrics that receive more engagement?
   2. Do you notice certain keywords or brand names across these tweets?
      1. Keywords and brand names peripheral to your practice and business make a lot of sense to share and include in your status updates. Write down those keywords and / or brand names.
   3. Are there certain Twitter user names (e.g. @VeridayHQ) in the tweets?
      1. Writing down the Twitter users who are helping you get engagement is a good way document targets for potential content partnerships and collaboration. This is a well known strategy to help boost your following.
6. After you’ve completed this exercise, let’s say you have something that looks like this:
   1. Subject matter: Retirement Planning
   2. Subject matter: Tax
   3. Keyword: money
   4. Brand: Google
   5. Twitter user: @VeridayHQ
7. Now that you have this list, work on sharing a larger portion of your updates (50-60%) focused on this criteria and see it your engagement levels and follower counts increase at a higher rate. Understandably, subject matter may be seasonal depending on the type of industry you’re in, for example, retirement, 401k and RRSPs might be top keywords in and around the January to March time frame so be sure to use your discretion at what keywords are best to use based on the time of year.

Are you using Twitter analytics to inform your content marketing strategy? Need help? Contact us here.