Maybe you retweet a cou­ple of things a week when you have time to log in for a few, or per­haps you’re even mak­ing time dai­ly to engage influ­encers. You’re real­ly ahead of the vast major­i­ty of your peers if you’re using Twit­ter to pro­mote your con­tent. But unless your Twit­ter is a mas­sive pow­er­house of engage­ments and link clicks, you have a ton of room to improve!

One year ago, I decid­ed to make a con­cert­ed effort to improve my Twit­ter strat­e­gy.

A huge part of this meant using Twit­ter Ana­lyt­ics much in the same way we use web ana­lyt­ics – to reveal valu­able insights that dri­ve improved per­for­mance in future.

As you can see in this graph of my Twit­ter fol­low­er count, I was tick­ing along with sev­er­al thou­sands of fol­low­ers for years, but nev­er real­ly get­ting any­where… that is, until I real­ly amped up my efforts around April 2014.

Since then, I’ve seen almost hock­ey stick-like growth and have gone from about 10,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers to more than 76,000.

Fol­low­ers have to be engaged in your con­tent and active­ly view­ing and click­ing on your tweets for the num­ber to be mean­ing­ful. In the first three months of 2014, my tweets earned about 1.5 mil­lion impres­sions. In the same 90 days this year, from Jan­u­ary 1 to March 31:

That’s about 180,000 impres­sions per day, which is more than 10 times the expo­sure my tweets were earn­ing just one year ago!

In just the last three months, my tweets have earned:

• 25.3K Retweets
• 27.8 Favorites
• 173.4 Link Clicks, many to my web­site and my own con­tent else­where on the web!

Crazy, right? Twit­ter is a huge dri­ver of qual­i­fied traf­fic to my site, thanks in large part to these four super action­able Twit­ter hacks.

Twitter Marketing Hack #1: Use analytics to identify your top performing tweets, then tweet more of what works.

Inter­na­tion­al Con­ver­sion Day took place April 9 and pre­sent­ed a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to get in front of peo­ple inter­est­ed in some­thing rel­e­vant to my busi­ness. What­ev­er your busi­ness or indus­try, you’re going to find these rel­e­vant occa­sions to tap into.

One thing I do reg­u­lar­ly is test dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of basi­cal­ly the same mes­sage to see what res­onates. This first tweet had a measly dozen link clicks, and had an over­all engage­ment rate of less than 1 per­cent:

Booooor­ing. Obvi­ous­ly my audi­ence thought so, too.

So I tried again, with this one:

Now this tweet was a win­ner. It earned 307 link clicks (5% engage­ment rate) say­ing the same thing and point­ing to the same web­page, yet it gen­er­at­ed 25 times more clicks!

Using Twit­ter Ana­lyt­ics allows you to look beyond the retweets and favorites to impres­sions and engage­ment rate. It helps you under­stand what sucked and what you need to do dif­fer­ent­ly next time. This is a huge time­saver for me, because I can see instant­ly which tweets are worth resched­ul­ing and just scrap the losers.

Twitter Marketing Hack #2: Learn from those winners and make more of them.

Sure, you can resched­ule your win­ners on Twit­ter, but you can also use Twit­ter Ana­lyt­ics to dri­ve your con­tent strat­e­gy else­where, as well.

Test­ing top­ic ideas is tough if you’re doing it with full-length blog posts; it takes a lot of time and effort to cre­ate each one. Ensure that more of your blog posts and arti­cles are win­ners by test­ing top­ics out on Twit­ter, first.

See which ideas and angles res­onate with your audi­ence by mea­sur­ing engage­ment with spe­cif­ic tweets. For exam­ple, I decid­ed to write this sil­ly col­umn on Inc.com after tweet­ing about the info­graph­ic:

Peo­ple loved it! The arti­cle was shared 2.3k times across social chan­nels, which is 3x more than the aver­age arti­cle on Inc.com. But then, I had vast­ly increased the chances of that hap­pen­ing by writ­ing about some­thing I already knew my audi­ence liked.

Peo­ple tend to spend most of their time writ­ing and then try to fig­ure out how to pro­mote it. Spend more time using ana­lyt­ics to see what your audi­ence responds to, then write only about the win­ners. Gen­er­al­ly, I’m look­ing for high sin­gle or even dou­ble-dig­it engage­ment rates in Twit­ter Ana­lyt­ics to tell me a top­ic idea is a win­ner.

Twitter Marketing Hack #3: Focus on online areas of impact.

Twit­ter tells you a great many use­ful things about your audi­ence. For exam­ple, I can see that my fol­low­ers are over­whelm­ing­ly inter­est­ed in tech­nol­o­gy, mar­ket­ing, entre­pre­neur­ship, lead­er­ship, and adver­tis­ing.

I can also see that 25 per­cent of my fol­low­ers also fol­low the Inc.com Twit­ter account. In the spir­it of focus­ing on the activ­i­ties that have the great­est impact, I start­ed writ­ing columns for Inc.com in Jan­u­ary of this year, focus­ing on those top­ics my audi­ence find most inter­est­ing.

This laser focus has a huge impact – you’re essen­tial­ly just using Twit­ter Ana­lyt­ics to give peo­ple more of what they want, more often:

In just the first three months of this year using this tac­tic, I more than dou­bled my Twit­ter fol­low­ing!

Twitter Marketing Hack #4: Cut the crap.

Remem­ber, always, that qual­i­ty is key. If qual­i­ty did­n’t mat­ter, you could go use one of those sketchy fol­low­back ser­vices to just buy your­self a few mil­lion Twit­ter fol­low­ers. But if you’re using Twit­ter as part of your online mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, you need to attract the right types of peo­ple and keep them engaged.

What you want to see is that your impres­sions are increas­ing over time, but with­out drop­ping your engage­ment rates.

You need to tweet more, but also tweet bet­ter.

Use your ana­lyt­ics to iden­ti­fy the top­ics and nich­es that drag your engage­ment rates down. Are they inte­gral to your busi­ness? If not, stop tweet­ing about them. If they are crit­i­cal top­ics for you, you need to find a way to tweet bet­ter con­tent. This might mean curat­ing more con­tent from rep­utable, non-com­pet­i­tive sources, if you don’t have time to cre­ate more your­self.

What’s the point of invest­ing in shar­ing oth­er peo­ple’s con­tent, you ask? It helps build your audi­ence so that when you do have some­thing of your own to share, you have rel­e­vant eyes to get it in front of.

Real­ly great tweets will grow legs and take on a life of their own – as more peo­ple share to their net­works, you’ll see your best tweets take off with a snow­ball-like effect, col­lect­ing more and more social endorse­ments as it goes. I’d even sug­gest pay­ing to pro­mote your best tweets – why not show off that awe­some engage­ment to a wider and still tar­get­ed audi­ence?

But first, get rid of your under­per­form­ers. Try dif­fer­ent con­tent types – arti­cles, info­graph­ics, reports, news – and dif­fer­ent for­mats includ­ing images, video and text, to find what works best for you. Then stop wast­ing your time on every­thing else.

Key Twitter Analytics Takeaways

Act­ing on ana­lyt­ics insights is so ridicu­lous­ly impor­tant that we’ve built an entire indus­try seg­ment out of web ana­lyt­ics. Yet we’re not near­ly as inten­tion­al with our con­tent and social efforts. You need to deter­mine what’s work­ing for you and do more of it – it’s that sim­ple.

• Keep Qual­i­ty High. Focus on engage­ment, as this is where you’ll get your viral expo­sure and align­ment with busi­ness goals from.
• Test, test, test. Try dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of the same mes­sag­ing (spaced out, obvi­ous­ly) to find the right tweet, which you might then pro­mote fur­ther.
• Eval­u­ate on an Ongo­ing Basis. There’s no set-it-and-for­get-it in real-time ana­lyt­ics. Use them to dri­ve your con­tent strat­e­gy on an ongo­ing basis.
• Stop Wast­ing Time. It’s a waste of time to sched­ule tweets that didn’t work well the first time. Focus on what works and quit invest­ing your time in every­thing else.

Are you act­ing on ana­lyt­ics insights to help achieve your busi­ness goals?