Twitter Analytics: Follower Count & Reporting Inconsistencies
-
Our number of followers on Twitter has suddenly dropped (yet not dropped) in a really weird way.
Twitter Analytics shows follower counts in two places: Monthly increases in followers, and then also in the Audience Insights tab, where you can see three months of follower counts mapped in a chart.
Month-to-month, the total number of followers continues to rise.
What’s inconsistent, however, is the total number of aggregate followers shown in the cart. Twitter just dropped our to total count of followers by about 600.
But it’s not like we just suddenly lost 600 followers last month (in fact we gained far more than that), but rather that Twitter seems to have adjusted the aggregate numbers across the board retroactively for all months. So while month-to-month continues to show gains, overall, we still went down.
The only way we would have even noticed this, by the way, is because we have a record of the OLD total follower count that Twitter had previously displayed as recently as last month.
So confusing.
We’re trying to figure out what happened, and the only thing that seems to make sense is that Twitter may have done a huge spam account purge, and instead of making it look like we suddenly lost a lot of followers, they just updated the aggregate total # of followers across all time……?
[For the record, we do not buy followers, but we don’t always do the best job at blocking spam followers when the do follow us either.]
Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.
-
Thanks for the clarification!
I've looked at quite a few different Twitter follower tools and ran this by a couple of other people on the community team and I've pretty much come to conclusions #2 or #3 that you mentioned. Unfortunately, there's just not really a clear cut way to figure out what happened.
Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer.
You might want to consider tracking your account in Followerwonk going forward if you aren't already. It's a good way to see if you've lost a bunch of followers, who those followers were, and look at the date to see if you posted something in particular that could have led to a dramatic follower loss. Doesn't really help your current situation, but might help if anything strange happens in the future.
-
Hi Megan,
We would not have noticed any discrepancy either at first glance. Each month, we record numbers from the last day of each month on the graph. The graph only shows the past 3 mos.
Imagine that on April 31, you recorded the following monthly #s from the graph.
February = 3,500
March = 4,000
April = 5,500And then, next month, when you looked at the same interface in Twitter, the numbers were all different.
February = n/a (won't go back that far)
March = 3,200
April = 4,000
May = 4, 500At first you'd think - wait. I recorded 5,500 followers in April, and now in May I have 4,500. Did I lose 1,000 followers?
Nope, because according to Twitter, because the graph still shows growth, and we can see the # of users added in May.
**It's just that for whatever reason, the aggregate #s were all lowered. **All data, across the board, is lower, even though it shows relative growth.
I see a few possibilities here:
1. Our records were wrong.
This is a possibility, but kind of unlikely since we pull the data each month, and we create a separate report for each month (so we have multiple historic record of the numbers being different and higher over time)... But who knows, human error happens.2. Twitter Purged Spam
Maybe they purged a bunch of spam accounts? If so, I would have expected to see a dramatic decrease in followers over one month - but maybe instead, they deleted all record of them, included when they were added, so while overall this lowered numbers, it didn't mess with the monthly growth pattern of legitimate followers.3. Twitter Analytics Bug???
Thanks. It's possible there may not be an answer to this, but it would be nice to know if anyone else has experienced something like this.
-
Whoops! It looks like those attached imgur pics aren't public. Sorry for the hassle! Hopefully one day we'll be able to upload images directly into Q&A questions.
In good news, I was able to login to one of our other Twitter accounts we own and I'm now seeing the same follower graph you're referring to. I'm just not seeing any discrepancies on our account, so any screenshots you can provide would be helpful. Thanks!
-
Hi Megan,
Thanks for the response! Your Interface for Moz is a little bit different from what I see. If I go into Twitter Analytics, there's a link on the menu bar for "Audience".
I added two screenshots under my (brand-new lol) Imgur account (see link below)
Basically, wherever you can find a chart of the past 3 months of Twitter follower numbers - there, it displays your TOTAL number of followers.
What happened to us is that our total number of followers dropped across all 3 months, over all time.
We keep track of the numbers on this page, and when we logged in recently, we were bewildered because none of the numbers for the past 3 months matched up to any of our records. They had all changed, as if adjusted en masse.
So while we have accrued new users month over month, the total numbers are all different, so it's like we lost followers... even though we didn't...
-
Hey Mirabile! My name is Megan and I work on the Moz Community team running our social accounts, including Twitter. I'd love to dive into Twitter Analytics and see if I can figure out what's going on with your follower count for you. I was taking a look at Moz's Twitter Analytics and I was having a hard time finding the follower chart under audience insights. I've attached a screenshot of what the top tabs/sections look like when I go to our audience insights section. Are you seeing the same thing? Can you direct me to the specific spot?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Twitter interactions
We would love for some feedback as we're facing an internal dilemma on how to utilize twitter for our business. We are launcing a new travel site that will connect travellers based on their activities and also serve as a booking platform. One part of our marketing team suggests we make two seperate twitter accounts; one 'formal' that follows a structured guideline in posting relevant material and one for the Social Media manager to reply to people as site official. The other part suggests we reply and interact using the 'formal' account; no second twitter account needed for interacting. What would you suggest?
Social Media | | Ilias__G0 -
Counting unique landing pages in Google Analytics: social vs organic channels
Remember the technique Rand posted for counting the unique indexed landing pages on a site? http://moz.com/blog/indexation-for-seo-real-numbers-in-5-easy-steps I'm using Google Analytics to compare this result for the "social" channel vs. the "organic search" channel. The idea is to see whether social or search delivers people to more unique landing pages. I would expect organic search to yield a significantly higher count, due to long tail searches for relatively obscure terms. We have an archive of over 500k pages that Google could be indexing, even if only a fraction of a percent of those might be getting social mentions. But that's not what the numbers show -- I'm seeing roughly 10% higher numbers for the Social channel than for Organic Search. Again, I'm counting unique landing pages here, not the total pageviews or visits. If anyone else here is monitoring these metrics, please chime in with your results. What's the baseline expectation for a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages of issue-centric user-generated content? Should search traffic provide 2x more landing page exposures than social? 5x? 10x? or 0.9x, as in my case? In short, I believe these numbers are pointing to an indexing/ranking problem following a recent site redesign.
Social Media | | mcglynn0 -
About url shorterner like ow.ly - does it count?
Hi there, I want to ask do you know does Google counts web pages' links in social medias like Facebook, Twitter etc when they are shortened like that: And is it better not to be shortened like that? http://ow.ly/2uk0Ow I am using HootSuite to post in those social medias and it automatically shortens them like that when there is a new post in rss emission.
Social Media | | vladokan0 -
Personal & Business Google+ Pages - which gives SEO juice?
Hi i set up a personal Google+ page and added a business page for my website www.over50choices.co.uk. The business page is linked to my site, but my personal profile "James Price" has the authorship and my blog, youtube, twitter accounts for over50choices linked to it - do i need to link all these accounts to my Google+ business page to get maximum SEO juice or will my personal page get picked up? Do i need to transfer all the social accounts to my business profille - help!? Thanks James
Social Media | | AshShep11 -
Any facebook likes/shares/activities analytics tools
From time to time I take a look at competitors' website and the activities on their social media channel like facebook. There are many times that their facebook likes increase much faster/more than we do while I havenot been able to figure out why they get likes much more that we do. Compared with the competitors we have very similar activities: uploading content to facebook daily and have competition every week and answer every question about our services and have faq session sometime I think our content/information are even more valuable than our competitors. I think they are possibly doing something more value-added to be able to target more people? Is that any tools that I can use to get any insight? e.g. some activities that I am not able to see? Have done some research for last few weeks but I did not manage to findout. Thanks
Social Media | | LauraHT0 -
Youtube and twitter
Does anyone have an idea how long it takes for the business profile to show up on youtube and twitter? I created profiles yesterday around mid afternoon. I searched for both today and they do not show up just yet. Thanks!
Social Media | | hawkvt10 -
SEO & Social | More SEO effect by liking the page URL rather than the Facebook Page?
SEOMoz Gurus, I am wondering what our best implementation strategy shoul dbe around linking up the Facebook Like button on our pages. Essentially there are two options: A) Linking the button directly to the Facebook Page of the web site so every Like is actually converting into a Facebook "Fan" which can be messaged going forward through our Facebook page. B) Having them like the actual URL which might be more beneficial from an SEO and viral perspective as now a link to the actual URL gets shared on the Liker's facebook wall and it should also be easier to use that lIke for Google & Co. as it's tied to the actual URL not a random Facebook page given that search engines already convert those signals. Both approaches obviously have their benefits. Are there any common guidelines on what is a better approach to take from a pure SEO perspective? Thanks /Thomas
Social Media | | tomypro0 -
I am looking for a reputable Q&A forum vendor. Any suggestions?
A vendor who has high domain authority; with a platform that is social media integrated, can provide a backup database, has advanced navigation options, is designed to be SEO savvy among other things... And basically anything that I can make look similar to the SEOmoz Forum!
Social Media | | gravityseo1