Twitter/X continues to be a popular social media network for companies, influencers, and individuals to reach a wide audience and get their message out. Because of this, it is understandable that many want to evaluate their progress, learn how they compare to their competitors, and find out what they can do to provide their performance. For this reason, they search for various Twitter/X KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that help them assess their activities on this social media network. 

In this article, we are going to tell you what Twitter/X KPIs you should consider tracking and why they are important. We will also explain how you can best track metrics and the types of insights you can gain by doing so. 

Why are Tracking Twitter/X KPIs Important?

Twitter/X KPIs are metrics that measure how your Twitter/X account is performing. These metrics help you to understand various aspects of your Twitter/X activity, from the reach and engagement of your tweets to the growth of your follower base and the effectiveness of your content strategy. 

By monitoring these KPIs, you can gain insight into your audience’s preferences, evaluate the impact of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to improve your social media presence. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or build a community of loyal followers, tracking the right KPIs is essential to achieving your goals on Twitter/X. 

Tracking different Twitter/X KPIs is essential when you are trying to understand and improve your performance on Twitter/X. First and foremost, KPIs are important in determining if your content is resonating with your audience and your overall strategy is effective. Since there are many ways to look at success, there are various metrics you want to consider tracking.

Second, KPIs are crucial in helping you compare your performance to that of your competitors or industry peers. This is important for goal setting, since you want to set realistic expectations based on data from your industry. It can also help you in analyzing the performance of your competitors so you can better understand what strategies may work and which ones do not.

The Most Important Twitter/X KPIs

We have created a list of 10 Twitter/X KPIs we believe you should understand and track. In going through these KPIs, we will explain what they are and the importance of tracking them. Keep in mind that a Twitter/X business account gives you additional insights that may not be available to non-business accounts. Moreover, there may also be need for a social media tool if you are serious about benchmarking your performance against your competitors and gaining other content insights. 

1. Number of Followers

This KPI is simply the number of followers that you currently have for your account. This metric is found on the top of your profile and no calculation for this metric is needed.

So, what is the purpose of tracking this metric? For one, it is important to understand where you stand in terms of followers compared to your competitors. This is an important step in goal setting since, ultimately, you most likely want to have an above-average follower count. The question then becomes how you can find this out. Perhaps the best way is to conduct a benchmarking analysis where you can find the average number of followers for all competitors in your industry. In this case, it is worthwhile to use a tool that allows for unlimited profile tracking, since this will help your calculation of the average to be most accurate. 

2. Follower Growth Rate

Tracking your follower growth rate is important since you can clearly see how quickly your profile is growing. Why is this KPI so important? It is helpful to track your follower growth rate since it shows you how fast your profile is growing. If your profile is growing quickly, this generally means that your strategy is working. 

If it is losing followers or staying at the same follower numbers, this shows you that you should change things. Similar to tracking your overall number of followers, it is useful to benchmark yourself against your competitors so that you know what a relatively good follower growth rate is. You should also research best practices related to ways to increase your Twitter followers.

3. Mentions

Mentions on Twitter/X occur when someone writes your account name/handle with an @ in a tweet. So why would you want to track Twitter/X mentions? First, you can get to know how your audience is interacting with you and how often they want to grab your attention. Second, you can use mentions to assess the sentiment expressed by users in their comments. In this sense, you can learn from positive Twitter/X mentions as well as negative ones. You can also analyze what users like or dislike about your content and your business. 

It can be quite time-consuming to count how many mentions you have on Twitter/X. Therefore, it might be a good idea to track it using a social media analytics tool so you can get a better idea of how often your profile is mentioned.  

4. Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your Tweets have been seen by your followers or non-followers during a time frame. This includes Retweets and quoted Tweets when they’re done by others. You can track impressions either by an individual tweet or on an entire account level.

Although impressions do not tell you the number of unique accounts that saw the tweet, it does identify how many times a tweet was shown. You need to keep in mind that Twitter/X reach and impressions are two different things, even though some may equivocate these terms (more on this soon). In reality, the number of impressions will be higher than the number of reach because a single tweet can be shown to a person multiple times.  

You can open the statistics of a tweet to see the impressions. This is available in your Twitter/X dashboard. However, social media tools can help you quickly discover your impressions on a post level as well as impressions from organic and/or paid posts. 

5. Reach

We already defined impressions, but what does reach mean on Twitter/X? Twitter reach is the number of users that have seen a post, rather than just the number of times a post has been displayed, regardless of whether a user saw it more than once. So when distinguishing between Twitter/X reach vs. impressions, think of the difference between how many unique users saw a post and the total number of times someone saw the post regardless of it being the same user or not. 

There are a few subsets of reach that we should briefly mention here. Twitter/X organic reach counts the number of users who have seen your tweet through non-paid means. Non-organic reach then is the reach of posts through paid means. If you are tracking your total reach in a specific time period, it is important to remember whether this time period includes promoted posts or not. 

It is important to measure Twitter/X reach to see how many people you are reaching. Not only can you reach your followers with your posts, but also non-followers who might become new followers. 

6. Engagement Rate   

7. Post Interaction Rate

Post Interaction Rate looks at the average number of interactions of your posts on a per-post basis. Similar to what we mentioned in regard to tracking engagement rates, it is useful to look at industry benchmarks so you understand what a good post interaction rate is. It is also important to note that you can use social media tools to help you improve your post interaction rates. For instance, you can use social media tools can help you find the best time to post on Twitter in order to help you discovery what posting times are correlated with high post interaction rates. 

8. Link Clicks

This metric allows you to analyze how many times a link in your account was clicked during a selected time period. Keep in mind that while a link click indicates that a user clicked on a link, they may have left the site before it loaded or bounced quickly. 

This metric tells you how many people interact with your content and are interested enough in your brand to visit your website or other external links that you may have added. This is a good way to quickly see whether your posts can be used to drive traffic to a particular URL. 

9. Click-Through Rate

Tracking your click-through rate on Twitter/X could be a useful metric to analyze whether your tweets are driving traffic to your website. Click-through rate is calculated as link clicks divided by Impressions. This metric can help you predict how many link clicks you gain from impressions. So, if you are looking to drive a specific amount of traffic to your website, you can get a sense of how many impressions you need to generate those clicks.

10. Profile Views

The last Twitter/X KPI that we will mention is profile views. This simply means how many people are visiting your profile page. You can choose to track this on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This can help you get a sense of how popular your profile is overall because many people viewing your profile is a good indicator of interest. 

The Most Important Twitter/X KPIs

If you have found that tracking your Twitter/X performance with this social media platform’s analytics dashboard is not enough for you, you may want to try a social media analytics tool. Not only can you manage multiple accounts with a social media tool, but you can also monitor your performance and conduct a benchmarking analysis.

If you are looking for a social media tool to help you better track your Twitter KPIs and benchmark your performance against your competitors, then try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial. Fanpage Karma offers a host of features and functions that include analytics, publishing, research, and community management. It also allows for unlimited profile tracking.

Fanpage Karma also offers a free weekly webinar that you are welcome to participate in.