Better analysis of Twitter analytics

Better analysis of Twitter analytics

Twitter’s new analytics tool is a big step toward helping media users and marketers to understand their successes on the platform, but the built-in displays are not very flexible. It is still hard to sort through the noise and understand your production throughout a period of time.

Here is a strategy to find the key information in the data Twitter makes available.

  1. For starters, download your data file for a period of time. Twitter has a download button on the top right of the analytics menu.
  2. The resulting file is a CSV and you can get a lot out of it with just the sort tools inside a spreadsheet program, but you can do even more if you import that file into Tableau Public.
  3. Tableau Public is a free program used by computer-aided journalists who are analyzing data. You’ll need to make an account to save your project, but once you do your results can also be posted online to share with your team.
  4. Inside Tableau, most charts need at least one measure (like the engagement percentage) and a dimension (like time or date). Try dragging time dimension onto a blank worksheet, then right-clicking on the bubble and dialing down to hours. If you then add the number of entries to the worksheet (a field Tableau generates), you should be able to generate a line graph or bar graph of your productivity per hour throughout your timeframe.
  5. Click the “See More” button to sort through the available chart types and get instructions for how many dimensions or measures are required to create a given chart.
  6. Also, try right-clicking on your measures/dimensions and checking the filters area to really focus your attention on a certain date, or level of engagement.

See my results with this strategy:

tableautwitter