Social Media Analytics - Working For You or Not?

[TammyPowlas]

This morning I posted Last Chance to Present at the Big Dance - ASUG Annual Conference and it being Saturday, I had to run some errands so I took my iPhone with me after posting.  While waiting for my appointment, I remembered reading I'm Obsessed With New Twitter iOS Analytics Feature - Business Insider

What is this?  If you use the Twitter app on the iPhone you have the option to "View Analytics" on your tweet.  I did that this morning:

I only see it on the iPhone, not the iPad and not Twitter on the web.

After clicking it, I see the following:

Not knowing what "impressions" meant, I searched and found this explanation from TweetReach:

"When we say "impression", we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions. ... Use these metrics to get a sense of the size of your potential audience, and use engagement metrics like retweets, clicks and replies to gain a more complete understanding of your impact."

To me it's even lower to see that only 3.8% clicked to expand the tweet.  That is low.

I searched for the number of engagements and this site and it says it is the number of replies, retweets, and mentions.  But that can't be right, as I didn't have that many replies/tweets/mentions when I clicked on the link.

After my appointments were over, almost 2 hours later, I clicked on the same "View Analytics" link again:

The numbers are up in terms of impressions and engagement but still a low percentage of those who expanded the tweet.

Scrolling further down:

After less than 2 hours, I only obtained 5 link clicks on Twitter.  That is very low in my opinion.

So since this is volunteer work (for ASUG), I am wondering what the best way is to promote content at little or no cost, attendance at events (like webcasts)?  In the past, I've seen direct e-mail campaigns increase engagement, registration and attendance but the downside is there are complaints about e-mail volumes.  Right now ASUG only sends weekly webcast listings for Volunteer-sponsored webcasts.

What do you think?