Twitter Analytics for ‘Best of 2016’ Tweets

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

If you’re like me, you’re in the middle of a very busy time of year.  I’m trying to wrap up a project (definitely not releasing it in December…January is better, sales-wise) in the midst of shopping, decorating, and driving my daughter to her own events.

Besides all that, I’m still trying to keep up my online presence. One of the ways I make this easier around the holidays is to schedule my ‘top tweets of 2016’. The past couple of years I’ve used a very convoluted method of discovering and then scheduling these ‘best of’ tweets.  But with Twitter analytics, I’ve found a better way.

First off, Twitter analytics is a very interesting tool, if you haven’t already been using it.  Journalist and Publishing Perspectives Editor-in-Chief Porter Anderson explains why in his post “How to Use Twitter Analytics to Boost Your Social Media Marketing.”  Even if you don’t want to schedule year-end tweets, if you’re not familiar with Twitter analytics, you should probably take a look. It’s interesting , at any rate, to see who your most influential follower is.

Here’s how to use it to learn your most popular tweets of the year:

If you left-click your profile picture, a drop-down box appears.

Click on Analytics

Click ‘View all tweet activity’

Click ‘top tweets’

Click the drop-down arrow next to ‘last 28 days’ and choose your date range

The tweets will pop up

You can also export tweets, but I found this less useful because I couldn’t get it to only download my top tweets.  Instead, it downloaded all my tweets (and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that’s a lot of tweets).  There was a lot of useful data in the spreadsheet, but it wasn’t what I was looking for right then. I just copy-pasted the tweets (individually), instead of exporting them.

Depending on what you’re looking for, you could tweet your highest performing tweet each month, all your top performing tweets for the month, etc.

I’d recommend making sure that there aren’t any dead links in your top tweets. I had quite a few since some bloggers had  switched from Blogger to WordPress.

You can schedule tweets in advance by using a tool like Hootsuite (the application that I use).  I added a hashtag to mine: #TopTweets2016.

Now I can keep up on Twitter while enjoying Christmas with family.

Have you taken a look at Twitter analytics?  Do you schedule social media?  What other tips do you have for making the holidays easier?

Photo credit: tonynetone via VisualHunt.com / CC BY