Thread by @kadavy

1/ Why Your Tweets Suck: The Analytics Twitter shows you are deliberately confusing.

They show what's good for *them* to show you. Not what’s good for *you* to know (a thread).

2/ The main graph on Twitter’s Analytics dashboard is “total impressions.” The more impressions your tweets produce, the more ad space Twitter can sell.

3/ If you’re using Twitter for marketing, you don’t just want your tweets to get impressions, you want your tweets to *make* an impression.

You could get lots of impressions simply by tweeting a lot. That says nothing about the quality of your tweets.

4/ You might say, “Well, Twitter shows you the engagement rate stat.” This stat is bullshit.

Engagement Rate is a ratio of engagements to impressions.

If you have more Retweets & Likes (engagements), you’ll have more impressions, thus leveling out your engagement rate.

5/ What you want is more impressions & engagements *per tweet*.

If your tweets are, on average, more engaging, you’re getting a higher ROI on your Twitter investment.

6/ I recently tried to start improving my engagements *per tweet*.

Here, you can see that my Retweets per tweet (7-day moving average) quadrupled from these efforts.

(I had to make this graph myself. Twitter doesn't provide this.)

7/ As a result, my impressions *per tweet* doubled.

8/ But, look at the “engagement rate” graph Twitter supplies. There’s no improvement to be seen.

That’s because, as I’m improving the quality of my tweets, I’m writing fewer tweets.

Remember, more engagements means more impressions, which means the "engagement rate" stays flat.

9/ Twitter doesn’t give a shit if your tweets suck. To them, the more tweets, the better (more space to sell ads).

Their Analytics are deliberately confusing, so you'll get sucked into spending more time on the platform, rather than actually learn how to improve your tweets.

10/ I break down more about how I have been re-thinking my Twitter strategy in my latest income report. kadavy.net/blog/posts/dec…