There’s one thing that every marketer and content manager needs to build a strong social presence. Followers!
Followers are like the fuel that powers a vehicle – the more followers you have, the further you can go on your social media journey.
Just like celebrities with their fans, your Twitter success depends on follower growth. Followers boost your content’s reach, drive awareness, and eventually lead to better engagement.
Read on to discover how to track followers, why you should track them, their growth rate, and some handy tools to effectively analyze your followers.

Why You Should Track Twitter Followers Over Time

While followers aren’t always signs of success, tracking them over time can help you better understand your brand’s impact. Monitoring your follower count will allow you to determine whether your content is helping you reach a specific audience or getting you noticed.
You can also gain valuable insight into your audience and how your content resonates with them. By analyzing your followers, you’ll know which types of content are most effective for gaining followers. You’ll learn the best times to engage them and even which influencers will help you grow.
Keep in mind that the engagement rate remains the same regardless of how many followers you have. Inactive, fake, and bot accounts may negatively affect your engagement stats on Twitter. As a result, brands also lose followers, so it’s worth exploring Twitter follower analytics.
Twitter follower analytics help you with real-time tracking so you can identify trends and opportunities, adjusting your strategy as you go. The following are some of the benefits of tracking your Twitter followers:

Gauge the Quality of Your Followers

Having a qualitative analysis of your followers is highly beneficial. You can track your followers to gain insights into the quality of your followers – their interests, locations, and more – so you can create content that better fits your audience.
Follower analysis not only gives you insights into your audience but also helps you identify how many bots or inactive accounts you have compared to your organic audience.

Analyze the Performance of Your Content

Analyzing your Twitter followers can give you valuable insight into the performance of your content. You can see what topics and hashtags are trending, which content resonates with your audience, and which demographics you’re reaching.
It can help you refine your content strategy and deliver content your followers will find valuable and engaging.

Identify the Interests of Your Audience

By analyzing your Twitter followers and their activities, you can gain insights into their interests, likes, and dislikes. It will help you determine which topics and content resonate with your audience and tailor your approach accordingly.
Additionally, tracking the interests of your followers can help you identify potential new followers to target.

Evaluate the Success of Your Campaigns

Tracking followers keeps your campaign successful and lets you adjust on the fly, ensuring your message reaches the right people.
As you conduct more campaigns, you will receive feedback from your followers, allowing you to enhance your services, thus boosting brand awareness. You can also engage with influencers and convert their followers into yours.

Identify Relevant Influencers

Using Twitter follower analysis, you can identify influencers in your niche and target them specifically with content and campaigns.
However, don’t forget to consider each influencer’s relevance, expertise, reputation, credibility, and alignment with your brand goals and values. It can help you increase reach and engagement, which ultimately aids in your goal-setting process.

What is Your Twitter Follower Growth Rate?

As you get more active on Twitter, you’ll realize you need to do more than just stay active. And maintaining a high follower growth rate can greatly improve your account. Twitter’s follower growth rate measures how quickly your account grows (or loses) followers compared with your old followers.
For example, the monthly follower growth rate would be the percentage growth your follower count has seen since last month. Briefly, a higher growth rate means your marketing is on track with engaging and intuitive campaigns. A dip, however, might mean you need to do some optimization.
You can calculate your Twitter follower growth rate using a simple formula. Here’s the info you need:
Number of followers at the start of the period
The total number of new followers added over the analyzed period (new followers minus unfollowers)
Follower growth rate = [New Followers/Existing Followers]*100.

How to Keep Track of Twitter Followers

Keeping tabs on followers ensures you have a steady grip on your audience and their behavior and preferences. It can open up more doors and bring more opportunities, making it a valuable practice for any business. It’s also helpful for knowing who is engaging with your content and who may need special attention. Here are some ways to track followers over time:

Manually in a Spreadsheet

Using a spreadsheet is one way to manually keep track of your Twitter followers by recording exciting followers, new followers, and the follower growth rate. You can also create custom metrics and charts based on how many followers you have daily, weekly, or monthly.
However, this approach may become impractical and tedious as your following grows, and you can lose data if you miss any days.

Use a Free Follower Tracking Tool

Utilizing a free follower tracking tool is the easiest way to stay informed and organized about your Twitter growth.
They track your follower count over time and notify you if anyone follows or unfollows you, making it easy to sort your followers by quality, engagement, and interests. They are free to use, but have limited features, less accuracy, and may pose risks to your privacy.

Use a Full-Featured Twitter Analytics Tool

By using a full-featured analytics tool like SocialDog, it is easy to track your followers and maintain a high follower growth rate. Additionally, trends and impressions are tracked daily, giving you a complete picture of your account’s performance and changes in followers over time.
If you review your analytics regularly, you can learn how to reach new audiences and grow your brand’s reputation and awareness.

Important Metrics for Twitter Follower Analysis

Twitter isn’t going to make you a star overnight. It takes time to get more tweet impressions, followers, visibility, and engagement. If you want your Twitter marketing campaign to be successful, you must closely monitor the right metrics.
The following Twitter analytics metrics will help you boost your reach, discover new leads, and get more traffic.

Top Followers

The top follower metric identifies which account following you has the most followers itself. This insight varies by month, so you should keep an eye on it.
You can take advantage of this metric by reaching out and thanking them for following. The more you know your top followers, the more you can build relationships with them and grow your audience.

Engagement Rates

The engagement rate metric provides a better understanding of how a tweet or general account performs. The engagement rate is calculated by dividing interactions (likes, retweets, comments, and replies) by total followers.
This metric helps marketers measure how well their content connects with their audience and motivates them to engage more.

Top Tweets

A top tweet metric also shows up on your main analytics dashboard. It’s the tweet with the most impressions or engagements in the month. You can find out what your followers like by analyzing your top-performing Tweets.
If you track your top tweets over time, you can identify trends and patterns among your audience that will help you maximize your tweeting efforts. Also, if you run ads, the top tweet is an excellent way to promote.

Profile Visits

This overview Twitter metric shows how often people click on your username or profile picture to open your Twitter profile. Visits to your profile indicate that your audience is interested in your business and your content.
You can analyze this metric in your Twitter Analytics dashboard at a tweet level (by clicking on a specific post’s activity) or on a homepage.

Video Completion Rates

The video completion rate is an invaluable tactical metric for improving Twitter posts and ads. It tells you if people watch your videos or skip them.
Without relevant video content, you will have low completion rates. But with compelling catchlines, you’ll usually increase your video completion rate.

Top 4 Tools to Analyze Your Twitter Followers

If you’re hoping to build a successful campaign, analyze your audience, or improve your follower growth rate, there is a Twitter analytics tool for you. Keeping up with social media can seem like a never-ending challenge, so measuring and analyzing Twitter’s performance is essential.
We’ve rounded up the 4 best Twitter analytics tools to track follower stats over time and ace your Twitter marketing.

SocialDog

SocialDog is the most trusted name in Twitter analytics thanks to its robust audience data analysis and reporting features. With SocialDog, you can drill down into individual followers’ data and get a detailed look at their profiles, DMs, interactions, and more.
It provides insight into how followers interact with your content and identifies audience trends. With its follower analytics, it provides data about follower growth rate, follower retention rate, and follower-following ratio, helping you better target your audience.
SocialDog comes with “hidden list” and “keep list” options so you don’t follow trusted users again or accidentally unfollow them. You can also generate Twitter analytics reports in CSV format.
For new users, SocialDog offers a 7-day free trial of its paid plans, so you can try out all of its features.
Price plan:
Lite: Free
Lite+: $12/month
Pro: $59/month
Business: $120/month

TweetBinder

TweetBinder provides comprehensive analytics to help users gain insight into their Twitter activity as well as analyze and compare Twitter accounts.
Any public Twitter profile’s follower count can be tracked over time using its Twitter follower tracker feature. It provides quantitative follower analysis and helps users detect significant losses in followers. You can group profiles into tags to view their follower growth.
Moreover, any change of follow and unfollow is notified every hour via email or discord. In terms of analyzing past data, TweetBinder is not very effective.
Price plan:
Starter: $79.99/month
Advanced: $275/month
Enterprise: $1,299.99/month

FollowerAudit

FollowerAudit is a leading platform for auditing Twitter profiles with a focus on follower analytics. You can keep track of your followers over time and discover what’s driving your audience.
Checking Twitter profiles with this tool is only possible if they’re public. FollowerAudit identifies authentic influencers and notifies you when someone unfollows you. In addition, it helps find inactive or fake followers.
Price plan:
Basic: $29/month
Professional: $49/month
Corporate: $79/month

FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is a freemium tool for tracking followers’ locations, the content they share, and how often they tweet. It also compares engagement levels and follower counts between your Twitter profile and those of similar brands.
FollowerWonk can help you reach a larger, more engaged audience by helping you better understand your target demographic.
Price plan:
Connect: Free
Target: $29/month
Multitask: $79/month

Track Twitter Followers With a Dedicated Twitter Analytics Tool

Success on social media is all about the audience. And follower growth is one of the metrics you can use to gauge your brand’s engagement rate, conversion rate, and overall reach.
To really get to know your followers, understanding their likes and dislikes, creating content that speaks to their needs, and continually optimizing your approach will help you increase follower growth and engagement.
Now that you’ve learned how Twitter followers can be analyzed, improve your marketing efforts using an all-in-one tool. Whether you’re a single business, a content manager preparing campaigns, or a marketer managing multiple accounts, SocialDog can help.
And it lets you track Twitter follower growth in real time without compromising your security.

Sign up for a free trial of SocialDog Business Plan