This week, I exported my Twitter data to gain insights into the engagement and reach of my posts in December. Twitter enables you to export the data fairly easily, and it can be visualized using various online tools and applications. Tableau has always been my preferred option because of its versatility and mobile-friendly visualizations.

The average daily number of impressions I received in December was 357. This numbers peaked on December 21 when a tweet appeared on 7,961 feeds thanks to a few high profile signal boosts (retweets). Engagement rate is a reflection of how many times people interact with a tweet relative to the size of its overall audience. It is often a more useful metric to consider because it reveals the impact and effectiveness of content.

In the above graph, engagement is indicated by the colour intensity of the blue line and impression count is reflected by its height. The two measures don’t always correlate. An influential user who signal boosts your content can quickly inflate the number of impressions; but if the post only resonates with them, engagement will remain low. The opposite can be true as well.

I also observed that people seem to care where you were posting from, as this was a possible indicator of the relevance of your content. In December, I was transitioning between jobs and moved to Vancouver from Toronto. During that time, I was unfollowed by several accounts in Ontario while in subsequent weeks I gained new followers from British Columbia.

Best Practices

It’s generally accepted that tweeting during commute times (around 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.) is effective because people taking public transit are a captive audience often passing time on their smartphones. Another good time of day is just after 12:00 p.m. when the office lunch crowd can surf on their smartphone with a bit more freedom.

These times, however, present a dilemma: If everyone is aggressively pushing out content simultaneously, the flow of traffic can congest the social media ecosystem and bury your message among thousands of others. There’s an alternate school of thought that adopting a more measured approach and sharing at non-peak times is a more effective strategy because the audience is less distracted by the firehose of social media posts, and this increases the likelihood your content will stand out.

So far, I’ve had more success with the former approach, but one constant is that posts with visual appeal (i.e. photos) gain the most traction. You can leverage this by enabling the Twitter card function, which will hyperlink images to your website; otherwise, visitors drawn to an image will likely click it to view and then simply click back to resume scrolling down their social feeds.