Find out why your most popular tweets got so many likes — and learn how to make it happen again

Impact
ByTebany Yune

Building an army of followers isn’t just for social media marketers anymore. Whether you have a business you’re promoting, trying to establish yourself as a brand, or just simply interested in making as many Twitter friends as possible, you need to have ways to find out what your most popular tweets are.

After all, knowing what your top tweets are will help you make more of them, as you’ll know what topics, hashtags, and word choices got you the most attention. You’ll also be able to learn more about your audience and what they like to see, helping you create future tweets that will hopefully appeal to both new and current followers.

To find your most popular tweets, you can choose from two types of services that offer analytical data: Twitter Analytics and third-party applications. Here’s what to know about both options.

Twitter Analytics

13_Phunkod/Shutterstock

Twitter Analytics is a free service offered by Twitter to help you learn how other users engage with your account every month. It’s easy to use and provides detailed information on tweet impressions, profile visits, and your average tweet engagement rate.

The service features sections called Home, Tweets, Audiences, Events, and More. Each section gives a thorough look at your most popular tweets, noting what days were best for posting in terms of engagement and telling you about upcoming events and holidays to use as inspiration for future tweet topics.

Home shows a summary of your account’s activity within the past 28 days. You will immediately see your top regular tweet, your top tweet featuring an image, and the number of new followers your page received.

The Tweets page displays a detailed graph of your tweets and the number of impressions each post made on other users. Located on this page is a Top Tweets tab that will reorder tweets by the most impressions, i.e. the number of times other users saw the tweet. This is a simple way to learn which topics and hashtags brought the most eyes to your account.

The Audience, Events, and More pages are useful for figuring out how to make your future posts into top tweets. Here you can find information such as the top interests of all users on Twitter to find a well-liked topic to post about, like dogs or Chrissy Teigen. You can also check here for weekly recurring hashtags that you can add to your tweets to bring more attention to your profile.

If you have a separate website for yourself or your business, Twitter Analytics can also track how many people visit your site after viewing your tweets. You can access Twitter Analytics through your own account by clicking on your profile picture in the upper-right corner, then clicking on Analytics (located under Twitter Ads) in the Account Info menu.

Third-Party Applications

everything possible/Shutterstock

There are several third-party alternatives that offer similar services to Twitter Analytics, but with substantially more info. Because of that, some of these services require subscriptions and are part of bigger social media management packages that cover a range of platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, rather than just Twitter. Listed below are two paid services, and one free service, all worth checking out.

Buffer is a social media management application that offers social analytics starting at $15 per month and advanced social analytics starting at $65 per month. The service offers an analysis of your tweets’ performance, noting which posts received the most retweets and replies, and which ones performed best for advertisement campaigns or increased engagement. Unlike Twitter Analytics, this application allows users to “check analytics for all [their] social accounts in one place, rather than going to six different networks,” according to its website. This includes multiple Twitter accounts, so you can check the performance of your business, personal, and/or hobby accounts all at once.

A subscription to Hootsuite, meanwhile, starts at $29 per month and increases to $129 per month for teams. It’s a platform that provides performance reports to users through charts and graphs, and it differs from Twitter Analytics by focusing on features intended for social media teams, so multiple people can view and track a Twitter account’s performance. Like Buffer, Hootsuite can also give information about the performance of multiple Twitter accounts. But what sets it apart is that rather than throw data at you with little explanation, the company provides thorough guidance and education on how to use the results of the reports to boost your Twitter profile.

Then there’s Socialbearing, a smaller, free service that only focuses on Twitter. The website offers performance summaries, charts of how frequently you tweet, and graphs that reveal how many retweets and tweets your posts get. Socialbearing goes beyond Twitter Analytics by providing a ranking of how often you use certain hashtags and what words you use most often. The page also displays a photo wall of your most recent tweets and sorts the wall by the views each post received. Another interesting feature is the site’s ability to count how many tweets have negative, positive, or neutral sentiments, based on the words you used in the posts.

Socialbearing can display analytical data from other public accounts, such as celebrity or business accounts, as well. Seeing the best tweets from different accounts can help you learn whether you can benefit from trying the same strategies.

These services can provide some valuable information if you’re interested in knowing what brings the most attention to your profile — and how to make sure it happens over and over again.