How to Conduct your Own Year in Review on Twitter

Facebook knows how to finish the year with class. For the last several, the social network has provided users with a “year in review” and variations of the sort. Users can review this summary and chose to post it to their timeline or not.

Twitter, on the other hand, provides no such feature, although the analytics Twitter provides do offer some insight. In fact, those analytics are a principle influence on the three articles I recommend each week for the Unscripted Marketing links roundup.

It’s a little more involved to perform an analysis of tweets for an entire year, but it can be done with a little creative use of the export tool and some spreadsheet yoga. What follows below are the top 10 articles I shared on Twitter – out of 3,306 posts in 2016 – which provides something of a snapshot of the marketing trends over the year.

1) AMA: Gartner’s CMO spend survey shows marketing budgets on the rise in 2017

2) Muck Rack: PR pros vs. journalists: pet peeve showdown

3) MarketingProfs: 3 ways marketers can tell their stories across multichannel touchpoints

4) Contently: Why Cisco is hiring over 200 content marketers

5) HBR: Content marketers need to act like publishers

6) Inbound: Is it time that Google removed Forbes from search

7) O’Dwyer’s: Cision brings in CEO from Oracle

8) MarTech Today: Introducing the “influencer marketing technology landscape”

9) B2B PR Sense Blog: How to write press release headlines that people actually read

10) Marketing Land: Why the blog post is killing the press release

Don’t miss these useful posts:
The First Tweets from 26 PR Influencers
The Audience Gets a Vote in Paid Social; Unscripted Marketing Links
Fragments, Social Media & Channels; Unscripted Marketing Links

How to Conduct Your Own Twitter Review

In order to conduct a review of you own account manually, follow these steps:

Go to the analytics tab (as shown above; click image for higher resolution)
Select tweets (shown below; click image for higher resolution)
Select the date range
Click export which will provide a .csv file of the selected data

Twitter will only allow you to export three months of data at a time. The remedy is to export four different .csv files, for example, a quarter at a time to cover the entire year – and then merge the data from the four spreadsheets into one (just cut and paste).

One you have these combined you can sort the data by any of the standard metrics Twitter provides – impressions, engagements, or replies for example. The list of shares I’ve provided above are based on clicks because I think that’s one of the stronger metrics Twitter offers.

Through this exercise, I’ve found it revealing to understand what sort of content I shared on Twitter in 2016 earned engagement and what didn’t.

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Photo credit: Andreas Eldh, Twitter (CC by 2.0)