How to track your charity’s Twitter activity in 2021

9 February 2021  |  Alex Cavalli

Many charities have become quite skilled at using social media to boost their reach and supporter engagement.

A 2019 study by Civil Society Media revealed that Facebook and Twitter were the most popular platforms used by the charity sector and charities such as the National Trust and MacMillan Cancer Support attract more than a million followers across both platforms.

The charity with the highest number of supporters on a single platform was revealed as Tate with almost 5 million people following the galleries on Twitter.

If there is a downside to using Twitter (or social media in general) for your fundraising campaigns, it is that it’s not always clear how well you are performing.

How effective is your tweeting?

If your answer to this is a shrug or a couple of vague statements then you won’t be alone. Many charities struggle to get to grips with how to measure success on Twitter. Although Twitter does have its own inbuilt analytics service, users often find it difficult to make sense of them.

Often the problem is less to do with the data available or even its presentation – Twitter excels in both areas. The issue is more likely to be related to the testing process itself.

We look at how you can use effective campaign testing principles on Twitter and understand how to use Twitter Analytics for both your organic and paid Twitter campaigns.

Understanding the campaign testing process

Whatever type of marketing campaign you are testing, you can apply the same five step process.

• Establish a baseline campaign
• Choose a relevant metric to improve
• Run an identical campaign but change just one element
• Measure the chosen metric
• Calculate significance

This same process can be adapted to your general Twitter activity by making small changes to the content of your tweets.

In fact, this is a good place to start because you can instantly start working on improving engagement without spending any money.

Establishing a baseline

When you are ready to start testing and optimising your Twitter activity, log in to your account, click the menu (three dots) icon and select Analytics.

Across the top of the page, you will see a 28 day summary of activity and if you scroll down, you can see summaries of activity over earlier months.

However, the juiciest data can be found by selecting the ‘Tweets’ tab at the top of the page. By selecting a date range in the box on the top right, you can quickly establish some useful baseline figures.

Across the top and down the right hand side of the page, Twitter very clearly displays both raw and average daily figures for the following:

• Impressions (how many times a Tweet was seen)
• Link clicks
• Retweets without comments
• Likes
• Replies

There is also an overall engagement rate for the selected period. This is the percentage of people who did anything with your tweet such as liked it, retweeted it or clicked a link or hashtag.

When recording your baseline activity, it is usually best to use metrics from the year before to avoid seasonal distortion. So, if you are planning a campaign for January 2021, note down your metrics from January 2020 as a baseline.

Choose your metric

Which metric do you most want to see go north?

For example, say your January 2020 figures were:

128 impressions per day, 2 retweets, 4 link clicks, 6 likes and 4 replies

While likes and replies are great, and visits to a link might lead to a donation, it is retweets that increase your reach.

By choosing ‘retweets’ as your target metric, you can then focus on what you can do to encourage people to retweet your tweets.

To be as scientific as possible about this, you should replicate your January 2020 campaign as faithfully as you can while making one change that you think will encourage retweets. This could be as simple as adding ‘RT to spread the word!’ to every tweet.

Measuring results

When measuring results, you need to look slightly beyond the metric you have chosen to measure.

For example, what would the following post-campaign results mean?

200 impressions per day, 11 retweets, 8 link clicks, 27 likes and 14 replies

Although you have achieved an increase in your chosen metric (retweets), you have also had more people seeing the campaign. A simple way to calculate whether your results were due to your changes or could have been random is to use a chi-square based split testing tool

By entering your impressions (visitors) and retweets (goals) in the boxes provided, then clicking calculate, you can instantly find out how significant your results were.

In this example, the results are borderline. There is a 10% chance that the results you measured were due to chance rather than the changes you made. Still, it would probably be enough to convince most people that the campaign worked.

Using Twitter to measure donations

Of course, what all charities really want to see is an increase in donations. Although you could include links to your donation page on every tweet and measure link clicks, you would get more accurate results by running a paid Twitter Ads campaign.

This will unlock conversion tracking, enabling you to add a snippet of code on your website and link it to your ad. You can also set a conversion window to track those people who donated several days after first seeing or clicking your ad.

As you can see, tracking Twitter activity is a little bit more involved than reading numbers off a chart. But by following the guidelines above, and with a little bit of practice, you will soon be tracking your 2021 campaigns like a pro.