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Yarin Hochman is Pravda Media Group’s analyst. His primary job is to gather, assess, and crunch data and somehow make sense of the numerical side of social media.

Last week Twitter introduced Organic Tweet Analytics, which allows publishers to measure how their organic (i.e not sponsored) tweets are performing.

Here at Pravda Media Group, measurement is a significant part of our working process used to make smarter, more informed marketing decisions. But what are the differences between TweetReach and the just released Organic Tweet Analytics? They sound pretty similar to me. 

TweetReach is an analytics platform for Twitter, which was designed to answer a simple question: How far did your tweet travel?
In order to answer this question, TweetReach has developed 2 major metrics to evaluate potential Twitter distribution. The first metric is Reach. Typically, reach refers to the capacity or range of something. In social media’s case, reach is the size of the audience for a message. What is the maximum number of people who could have been exposed to a message?
Reach, as we see here, is the total number of unique Twitter accounts that potentially received at least one tweet in a given period.

In addition, TweetReach also uses a metric called Exposure. This refers to the number of overall impressions generated by tweets in a specific report. First exposure, now impressions? Impressions refer to the total number of times an account’s tweets were delivered to timelines, including repeats. Since replies are only delivered to common followers’ timelines, they are calculated as a single impression.

reach_vs_exposure
So we’ve covered TweetReach. Now let’s discuss Twitter’s new analytics product, which takes a slightly different approach. Twitter measures the amount of overall impressions the user’s tweets have received. The Impressions metric is similar to TweetReach’s Exposure metric. However, Twitter currently only measures data for Tweets dating 28 days back. We’re hoping in the future we’ll be able to customize and view various time ranges.

Some early tests we’ve done show that TweetReach’s exposure numbers are much higher than Twitter’s own analytics. That could be attributed to the fact that TweetReach is measuring potential exposure, while Twitter is more strict in the way it measures this KPI.

Another key metric in the new Twitter analytics product is called Engagements. Engagements are the total number of times a user has interacted with a tweet. Twitter also offers some additional textual insights to provide a better understanding of the account’s current state compared to previous performance. We can view engagement rate, averages for the period, link clicks, Retweets, Favorites and Replies. “So far today, your Tweets have earned 265 impressions. This is lower than your 28-day average of 1.4K impressions per day.”

What we like about this product is that beyond basic data, Twitter analytics gives further, more sophisticated insights about individual tweets, such as: user profile clicks, time of day a Tweet is viewed, from which platform they viewed (web, Android, or iOS apps), and the origin of new followers.

These types of statistics were not available before and can be used as a very effective measurement tool to fine-tune brand’s messaging on Twitter, perform A/B testing about tweets sent in various hours of the day, as well as compare stats from companies’ several owned accounts.

Both TweetReach, which we’ve been using for quite some time, and the new Twitter analytics are very powerful and insightful tools, which can be invaluable to a digital marketeer. It is clear that Twitter’s new product is still in a very early stage in terms of evolution and capabilities. However, one thing to keep in mind is that since it is a product of Twitter, it is likely that the data provided would be more reliable and less prone to errors and manipulation.

Do you have experience with TweetReach or Twitter’s new analytics tools? We’d love to hear any additional insights you have!