It seems like every time I am on campus I am playing a perpetual game of Frogger™ dodging the endless streams of students, heads down and consumed with the smartphones we now all live and die by. While I could rant about the etiquette of maintaining an awareness of your surroundings while walking, I won’t waste your time. What are these students doing and what can we learn from these habits of the student population?

There is a good chance that some of these drones are part of the 18% of internet users currently using Twitter. With 31% of the 18-29 demographic using the platform[1] it has become an area where many colleges and universities have attempted to reach out and engage with current and prospective students alike. Some universities are very good at doing this such as Texas A&M (@TAMU) or Syracuse (@SyracuseU)[2] but do they know what posts were successful, or why they were successful? Twitter analytics does!

Basics of Twitter Analytics

Luckily Twitter’s analytics platform is fairly straightforward once you are on the site. Segmented into three basic dashboards you can monitor the success of your specific tweets, gain insights on your followers, and manage your Twitter Cards.

The Tweets Dashboard:

The Tweets dashboard is your place to go to see which of your tweets were most popular and, more importantly, which of your tweets engaged your audience the most. Look for specific types of content that tends to drive clicks to the site or specific messaging which encourages re-tweets, and then use those trends to dictate future content to better serve your audience.

The Followers Dashboard:

Your Followers dashboard will allow you to gain the insight on who that audience is.

These demographics are key in the creation of user personas that allow you to guide the direction of content. Additionally, the interests section of this dashboard is extremely helpful in determining content themes would be most attractive to your followers.

Twitter Cards:

Lastly, the Twitter Card dashboard. Twitter Cards highlight your photos, videos and stories to drive more traffic to your site, like in the example below. These cards have the additional benefit of specific analytics that help you measure the impact of your Tweets on clicks to your site. If you aren’t using Twitter Cards, you won’t see any information on this dashboard. Setting up Twitter Cards does involve tagging your website content with HTML markup so you may want to have a developer ready to help. Learn more about Twitter Cards and Twitter Card Analytics from Twitter.

You can now shoot, edit and share video on Twitter. Capture life’s most moving moments from your perspective. pic.twitter.com/31JoMS50ha

— Twitter (@twitter) January 27, 2015

Defining Your Twitter Campaigns

As with everything in relation to marketing campaigns, you must first have a clear goal in mind if you are ever going to know if you were successful. All of the favorites and re-tweets in the world do not mean a thing without knowing you have gotten users to complete the actions you would like them to. If you are looking solely for awareness, set percentage increase goals for impressions and re-tweets. If you are using Twitter to drive prospective student RFIs than you will want to measure CTR and conversions on the landing pages that you are driving Twitter traffic to. It is a matter of having a clear goal set up-front and knowing which metrics are a measure of success in the completion of that goal.

On your mark, ready, set, TWEET! There are of course different caveats as you begin to explore the realms of Twitter Ads or promoted content but for day-to-day measurement of your Twitter activity you now have a baseline understanding as to what you are looking at. Happy Tweeting!