Twitter adds Analytics to Track Performance (and it’s free)
Twitter has had analytics for any advertising that you may have done on their platform, but now they have opened up those tools for use with your regular tweets and to look at your followers in more depth.
To access the analytics, go to ads.twitter.com – the advertising platform on twitter. Login using your Twitter account login. You will click on the Analytics tab on the left part of the navigation. You can select either Timeline Activity or Followers. (Followers only provides information when you have a large enough group of followers.) Selecting Timeline Activity displays a dashboard like this:
You can choose to view All, Best or Good. Best shows you the top 15% of tweets with some level of engagement within the date range you are viewing. Good shows the top 66% of tweets with some level of engagement within the date range.
You can now easily gauge referrals now since the tool shows you how many people clicked on a link in your tweet. You can even download the data as a CSV file to track behavior over a longer period of time and use it to build compare with other tools and data.
As Twitter continues to figure out ways to make money with advertising and other options, I’m certain that the analytics will get more extensive, but this at least gives a nice, easy way to track performance and help determine engagement with your tweets. And best of all, it’s free.
Facebook introduces Hashtags
Facebook has stated that they will be rolling out more features to help surface the larger conversations and topics that people are talking about. The first of these will be the use of hashtags.
Thankfully if you have already been using hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., you will just continue those same efforts now on Facebook. They will be used the same way to add context to your post or indicate that it is part of a larger conversation. (If you haven’t started using hashtags, see our blog post, Hashtags – They’re not just for breakfast anymore, to help you get started.)
According to Facebook you can:
- Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. For example, #NBAFinals.
- Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
- Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.
As always, you control the audience for your posts, including those with hashtags.
As an event marketer, the benefits are that you now can begin to see similarities and differences in the behaviors around your conversations across all of your primary social media efforts. #lovesimplification
Instagram adds Video Functionality
Instagram launched an update for their app which now includes video support. The new feature allows you to take video from 3 seconds to a maximum of 15 seconds, apply filters similar to how you have always done with photos and share out on Instagram and other social site. Another cool feature is built-in image stabilization to take out the jitters from moving your cell phone around. You can select a still image from within your video to represent it rather than being stuck with just the first frame.
We had mentioned Vine, Twitter’s 6 second video sharing service, a while back. This is Facebook/Instagram’s competitive response. With as popular as Instagram has become, I’m sure this will take off like crazy.
Techcrunch put together a nice comparison on Vine and Instagram:
The great thing for events is that rather than adding yet another social site, you simply can start sharing more rich content with the same services that you likely have been focused on.