In January, I decided to venture inside my Twitter data during a relatively quiet month to see what types of insights I could gather. Twitter enables you to export the data fairly easily, and it can then be visualized using various methods. Tableau has always been my preferred tool on account of its versatility and mobile friendly visualizations.

The average daily number of impressions I received in December was 357. The 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 interacted with a tweet relative to the size of its overall audience. It is often a more useful metric to consider because it reflects the impact and effectiveness of content.

In the above graph, engagement is indicated by the colour intensity of the blue line whereas impression count is reflected in its height. The two measures often don’t positively correlate. An influential user who signal boosts your content can quickly inflate the number of impressions, but if the post only resonates with him or her, engagement will remain low. The converse is true as well.

I also observed that people seem to care about where you were tweeting from, as this was a possible indicator of the relevancy of your content. During the month of December, I was transitioning between jobs and moved from Toronto to Vancouver. In that time, I was unfollowed by several accounts in Ontario while in subsequent weeks their absence was filled by new followers from Vancouver.

Best Practices

It’s widely agreed 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 bit of a problem: 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 more effective because it gives you a less distracted audience and increases the likelihood your content will hit its mark.

So far, I’ve had more success with the first approach. One constant, however, 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 who are drawn to an image will most often click it, then simply click “back” to resume scrolling down their social feeds.

GIFs are also an effective way to capture someone’s attention. Websites like http://gifmaker.me allow you to create your own using multiple images.