X (Twitter) analytics: How to view insights and improve your data

When X (formerly known as Twitter), rebranded in 2023, a new marker was placed on the timeline of social media history. After the rebrand, the social network remains a place to connect with people across the globe. An X/Twitter marketing strategy gives you the opportunity to reach millions of people, share information in real-time and build an engaged community. But how do you know if your X/Twitter strategy is paying off?

Social media analytics–specifically your X/Twitter analytics.

Monitoring X/Twitter analytics provides essential data to assess your performance. It helps you figure out strengths and improvements you need to make to your strategy. By leaning on data, you can ‌make informed decisions to maximize outcome. You can use the network’s native analytics to track important performance metrics. In this guide, we’ll show you how to view the X/Twitter analytics dashboard and how to make the most of your X/Twitter insights.

What are X (Twitter) analytics?

X/Twitter analytics are key metrics used to determine how your posts perform and how your audience responds. You can use X/Twitter analytics to track and measure follower count, impressions, engagement, reposts, replies and more. Your native X/Twitter analytics dashboard lets you see these key metrics.

This data is critical for understanding who’s interacting with your posts and how your account is performing overall. Even if you log in daily and generally understand how your account performs, it's essential to get specific data to confirm those assumptions. You can then use these insights to refine your strategy.

How to check X (Twitter) analytics

You must have an X Premium account to see the native analytics dashboard. You can access the dashboard directly from https://analytics.twitter.com and https://x.com/i/account_analytics. Or follow these steps to see your Twitter analytics.

How to view Twitter analytics from desktop

1. From your homepage, click the Premium button on the left-hand panel. Click Analytics in the Quick Access section.

2. From here, you'll see an account overview featuring key metrics including impressions, engagement rate, profile visits, new followers and other metrics. You can view data from the past seven days, 28 days, three months or year.

If you scroll down, you’ll see specific data points for various metrics.

3. Use the green and blue drop-down menus on the left under Account Overview to toggle between different metrics such as likes, bookmarks and replies. You’ll see a line graph comparing these metrics over a chosen time period.

4. Use the dropdown menus on the right to toggle to a bar graph.

5. Click the Content tab to view metrics for individual posts.

How to view X (Twitter) analytics from mobile

If you don’t have a Premium account, you have the option to view X/Twitter analytics on the mobile app. Keep in mind that you won’t get access to the full analytics dashboard on mobile that you would on a desktop. You can only view analytics for individual posts.

1. To view your X/Twitter analytics on mobile, tap the post you want to analyze.

2. Tap the graph icon located button at the bottom right of the post.

This will give you ‌an overview of impressions, engagements, detail expands, new followers and profile visits from the post.

Who are X (Twitter) analytics for?

Anyone interested in how their X/Twitter account is performing should use them. This includes creators, social practitioners, marketing leaders, agencies and businesses who have goals based on key performance indicators (KPIs).

X/Twitter analytics will help you find the types of posts that are most interesting to your followers, no matter what you do or what title you have. These insights are crucial for optimizing your X/Twitter marketing strategies to maximize results.

X (Twitter) analytics for practitioners

If you’re a practitioner, an X/Twitter analysis will help you understand how your posts perform because you can drill down into metrics for each post. You can see your top posts to find out which ones resonate well with your audience to inform and optimize your content strategy and reach your social media goals.

X (Twitter) analytics for marketing leaders

As a marketing leader, you likely want to drive adoption and retention of products and services. You can use X/Twitter as a channel to bring in leads and guide people through the sales funnel. Your goals might include conversion rates, repeat purchases and cross-sell opportunities. Although users can’t purchase directly on the platform, you can share a link to your website for purchasing and review post link clicks to determine if a specific post is converting customers.

At the same time, you can also use the network for growing brand awareness and engagement. Managers will find X/Twitter analytics helpful because you can understand the social return on investment (ROI) of paid and organic efforts. You get a comprehensive view of areas where you need to improve and understand how well your team is performing.

How X (Twitter) analytics drives business results

By using the insights provided by X/Twitter analytics, businesses can gain a competitive edge and make data-driven decisions that directly impact their bottom line. Here’s how X/Twitter analytics can help you drive positive business impact.

Holistic perspective of your target audience

Analytics gives you a comprehensive understanding of your audience. For example, a retail brand might use follower growth and engagement rates to identify that their most active audience includes young adults aged 18-25. By tailoring their content to this demographic, they can increase engagement and drive more sales.

Inform content strategy with performance data

Monitoring X/Twitter analytics offers insights into the performance of your content. Imagine a tech company that posts a mix of blog links, infographics‌ and videos. By tracking metrics like impressions, clicks and reposts, they determine infographics consistently outperform other content types. This information helps them establish a case for creating more infographics.

Measure impact of social media marketing campaigns

Another significant benefit of X/Twitter analytics is the ability to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns in real-time. For instance, a food delivery service launches a new campaign promoting a discount code. By monitoring campaign performance metrics, they notice the campaign is underperforming in certain regions. They can then adjust their strategy by offering a more enticing promotion or targeting different regions to optimize their campaign and convert more customers.

What metrics can you track with X (Twitter) analytics?

Social media has its own language. It’s important that you know about metrics like mentions, hashtags, impressions and other KPIs so you can understand what you’re measuring.

Here are some of the key metrics you’ll find within the native Twitter analytics dashboard. We’ve also included other metrics to track using third-party Twitter analytics tools.

Impressions

The total number of times users saw a post.

Reach

The number of users who saw an impression of your post in their timeline. Native analytics doesn’t provide reach metrics, but you can use an X/Twitter analytics tool to calculate reach for you.

Engagement

Total number of times a user interacted with a post. This can include likes, reposts, replies, followers, mentions and link clicks.

Engagement rate

The percentage of users who saw your post and took action. This can be a like, comment, share or another interaction like a repost. Engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by the sum of impressions.

Link clicks

The total number of times people clicked on a link in a post during a set timeframe.

Mentions

The total number of instances where a user talks directly to your brand account or about your brand in a post.

Followers

The number of X/Twitter users that subscribe to your updates at any given time.

Response rate

Percent of inbound messages you respond to. This is a common metric used by social customer care teams who want to determine how long it takes to respond to relevant messages.

Response time

The amount of time it takes your business to respond to inbound messages.

Profile visits

The number of users who visited your profile within a given timeframe.

Top posts

The posts that earned the most impressions during a given month.

Top mention

The mention that earned the greatest number of engagements during a given month.

New followers

Net new people who followed you directly from a post.

Follower count

How many new followers you’ve gained minus how many people have unfollowed your account.

Reposts without comments

The number of people who reposted a post without adding a comment.

Likes

The number of likes that your posts received during a specified timeframe. It's the small heart icon below every post.

Replies

The number of replies that your posts received during a specified timeframe.

How to maximize X (Twitter) analytics with Sprout Social

X/Twitter analytics give you a wealth of information to create better content and reach new audiences. Here’s how you can use Sprout Social to maximize your Twitter analytics insights and inform your broader social strategy.

Identify your best content

Look at all the posts you’ve sent and identify which content has performed best. Use those insights to create content that’s more likely to resonate with your audience.

Access this data from the Post Performance Report in Sprout. This gives you an overview of post-level performance across all your profiles. You can filter the report to only show the X/Twitter profile you want to review or compare across networks.

You'll see metrics like impressions and potential reach. In this report, you'll also see the engagements and engagement rate per impression for each post.

With this data, you can identify why these posts were so successful.

• Find common themes in those top posts. Did it contain a hashtag, mention or question? If so, think about including those in the future.
• Were there particular days or times that seemed to work best with your audience? If so, schedule around those times in the future, or use Sprout’s Optimal Send Times™ to automate the best times for you. This AI-powered feature takes all the guesswork out of scheduling.
• Export your top posts and create a word cloud to more easily visualize messages that resonate.

Uncover trends in performance and audience insights

The native X/Twitter analytics dashboard is helpful for analyzing your activity. But it no longer gives you audience insights to analyze your X/Twitter followers. The Audience Insights tab was removed in 2020.

Fortunately, Sprout offers a robust toolset to better understand your followers. Sprout Social Listening gives you a variety of tools to help you learn about your audience, along with identifying trends and relevant topics for your audience. With Listening, you can get a detailed breakdown of people interacting with a specific topic, whether your brand was mentioned or not. Beyond audience insights and trendspotting, Listening can also help support competitive analysis—you’ll be able to pinpoint what your audience is saying about your industry contenders.

This helps you understand whether your target audience is participating in relevant conversations. The device demographics section also gives you a sense of how people like to communicate when discussing a given topic.

Identify advocates and X (Twitter) influencers

Using the Profile Overview chart in your Listening Demographics can help identify influencers. It shows you which profiles are engaging in conversations around a given topic. This will help you uncover key influencers and advocates on the topic.

From this breakdown, you can easily view the gender, age, volume and engagements for each profile. Sort the list by volume and engagements to see which profiles are dominating the conversation.

From there, you can start outreach to add more names and faces to your influencer marketing strategy.

Visualize X (Twitter) campaigns with real-time results

Are you and your team creating campaigns? Sprout lets you track both organic and paid campaigns on X/Twitter through Tagging. Tag each outbound or inbound social media message with dedicated campaign designations. See the following example for “Iced Coffee,” “Lemonade” and “Sunny Sale.”

Then track the entire campaign's success within a single dashboard using metrics like:

• Impressions
• Engagements
• Clicks
• Average messages sent per day
• Total sent
• Average messages received per day
• Total received
• Growth trends

Use X (Twitter) analytics to back your strategy with data

Monitoring your social media analytics regularly enables you to find out what works and what doesn’t so you can make informed business decisions.

With proper preparation and finding the right tools, like Sprout, you’ll uncover the exact insights you need from X/Twitter) analytics. See for yourself and sign up for a demo.

Use of Twitter nomenclature across Sprout refers to newly rebranded X platform and related terminology.

X (Twitter) analytics FAQs

How do I check my X (Twitter) analytics?

You can check your X/Twitter analytics directly from https://analytics.twitter.com or https://x.com/i/account_analytics. From your homepage, you can also go to Premium > Quick Access > Analytics.

What does X (Twitter) analytics measure?

X/Twitter analytics measure post and profile performance over time. It lets you track metrics such as impressions, engagements, profile visits, mentions and follower growth.

Why can’t I see my post analytics?

To see your X/Twitter analytics, you need to be logged in and have analytics turned on. If you still can’t see your analytics after this, it’s likely because of the following reasons:

• You don’t have a Premium account. You must have a subscription to view analytics for multiple posts.
• You’re not primarily posting in one of the supported languages.
• Your account is younger than 14 days.
• You’ve violated Twitter policy.
• Your account is deleted, restricted or suspended.