Baselines, Deeper Metrics & Useful Comparisons

In my last post (“Unintentionally pointless“) I mentioned that I’d been looking at my Twitter statistics over the past year and how I hadn’t really found any insight into how I’m landing. Thinking on it some more and doing a little more work I’ve realised that’s not quite true.

Baseline

Measuring performance over a period of time does give a baseline of sorts on Twitter. The value of this is that it allows you to see retrospectively if that baseline shifts. If you are adopting a new approach you may be looking for your baseline metrics to shift. If you see a shift in your baseline that you aren’t expecting it can make you think a bit deeper perhaps. Obvious stuff really but there is value there and it can tell us something about our behaviour and impact on Twitter.

Deeper Metrics

Twitter gives some pretty useful measures on its analytics page. I haven’t gone too far into individual tweet analysis but I can see that for a brand and especially for campaigns or particular desired responses you could get some quite nice granularity.

For me I’ve constructed a view on “average content engagement per tweet” and “average impressions per tweet“. There’s a degree of flux in my tweeting habits so I think these give me a more interesting baseline than say total impressions per month.

What I have seen is an upwards movement in these over the last quarter with the quarters before this flat or slightly increasing. I don’t want to put a narrative to this shift yet but expect I will in a couple of months time. Given my recent clear out of who I’m following I’ll be curious to see what impact that has.

Useful Comparison

Part of what struck me over the weekend was that I have the benefit of 2 twitter accounts to compare. I hadn’t considered that. I don’t think I’m interested in comparing myself to others but to look at the impact of my tweets with a business focus (@ChangeContinuum) versus myself with a personal focus (@David_Goddin) is quite interesting.

At face value the business account has significantly more impressions but a much lower engagement rate than the personal account. Kind of what you might expect with a bigger professional audience versus more a personal group.  Also, I tend to post more pictures and Vines as well as chat more with friends on the personal account. Whereas the business account will be commentary, links to content and conversations but less chat with friends.

So when I look at “average impressions per tweet” I’m not that surprised that the monthly trend is twice as high on the business account. It’s curiously encouraging that the personal account tends to mirror the trends on the business one. I@m not sure if it should be but it is!

However, when I look at the “average content engagement per tweet” I’m slightly surprised that the same story is true. The monthly trend is nearly twice as high on the business account. With the engagement rate on the personal account being much higher I would have expected the opposite result…

What does it say? I’m not quite sure but it’s making me think a little deeper. That’s what I think good and useful metrics do.

Thoughts welcome! I hope the above has been useful to share.