Google Data Studio is one of the most powerful, yet underrated free technologies available on the internet. Google Data Studio makes it incredibly easy to pull data from tons of different sources and compile them in easy to understand graphs, charts, and visualizations. Whether you own a marketing agency, are the head of a marketing department, or are an entrepreneur trying to take a more data-focused approach to growing your company, Google Data Studio offers a powerful solution.
Using Google Data Studio for Twitter
As mentioned, Google Data Studio can link to hundreds of different sources of data from around the internet automatically. Some options include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Sheets.
Now for some bad (and good) news. Google Data Studio can’t be directly linked with Twitter. The good news, however, is that it does work with Google Sheets and Twitter’s analytics suite makes it easy to export data in a CSV format.
In this guide, you will learn how to pull important analytics data from your Twitter account into Google Data Studio to create beautiful and helpful social media reports for your company, your clients, or yourself.
Step 1: Get Your Data From Twitter
The first step in this process is navigating to Twitter Analytics on your computer.
To get there, you can click the link in the previous paragraph or simply go to twitter.com. From there, click the ‘more’ button at the bottom left of the screen.
This will open up another menu with more options. Choose ‘Analytics’.
Once you do that you will be brought to your Analytics Suite. At the top, you will see a menu with the option “Tweets”. Click that.
You can now see your tweet activity. At the top right of the screen is two dropdown menus. For the first, choose the time frame you would like to export and analyze (more is better).
Then, with the next drop-down menu, choose to export data by day. This will ensure the exported file is in the proper format to be analyzed on a time-basis.
Note: it appears data can only be exported one month at a time. If you wish to analyze data from multiple months, you will have to download each month separately.
A CSV file will be downloaded automatically.
Step 2: Import Your Data to Google Sheets
Now that you’ve exported your Twitter data. It’s time to put it somewhere that Google Data Studio will be able to access it. Google Sheets is a great place for this.
Create a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets and copy-paste your data.
Like we mentioned earlier, Twitter can only export data one month at a time. So, if you are analyzing statistics from multiple months you will have multiple CSV files that need to be combined into one.
Step 3: Link Google Data Studio with Google Sheets
You have your data in Google Sheets. Awesome! We are almost there.
Now its time to actually open Google Data Studio.
Once you are here its time to add your Google Sheet as a Data Source. To do this, click the ‘Create’ button on the top left.
This will bring up some of the many data source options available to you. Choose the Google Sheets option.
You’ll now see all of your Google Sheets spreadsheets. Select the one you pasted your Twitter data to. If you have multiple worksheets within your spreadsheet choose the one with all of the data.
Then, click the blue ‘Connect’ button on the top right.
Step 4: Create a Report
After you’ve connected your new data source its time to add it to a report. There are two ways to do this.
- Click the blue ‘Create Report’ button on the top right
- Exit this screen and go to create a new report from a template you already have. The Twitter data will now show as an available data source.
If you don’t already have any reports created just go with option 1.
It will now open up a new report. Woohoo!
It probably created a graph for you that isn’t too useful for analyzing your data. Let’s change that!
In the image below you can see that it is displaying my Twitter data by record count. To change that click on the graph and check out the ‘Metric’ area on the right side of the screen.
Let’s change ‘Record Count’ to something more useful like ‘impressions’.
Now, right below that, you will see ‘Add Metric’ if you’d like to analyze other metrics this is the time to add them. Google Data Studio is highly customizable. For this example, I will add the metric engagements.
Now all your twitter data is plotted by date, impressions, and engagements. You did it (almost).
Step 5: Format Your Report
Next, let’s format the report in a way that’s more readable like a time series chart. To do this, click on where it says ‘Chart > Table’ above the data metrics area on the right.
Now, hover over each graph option until you find ‘Time Series Chart’. Select that.
Viola! Your chart is now a beautiful time series chart.
But, as you might notice, the graph is plotting impressions and engagement on the same x-axis which makes engagements really hard to see. An easy fix!
Click on the chart. Within the chart options area on the chart is the option ‘Style’. By clicking on this you’ll open up the styling options.
Your chart now has both the impressions and engagement data in a super easy-to-read format. Awesome!
Pat yourself on the back because you are now a Google Data Studio guru!
Share Your Report
If you’d like to share this report with someone like a client or colleague, Google Data Studio has made it super easy.
On the top right of the screen, you can find a ‘Share’ button. Click here and add the email address of whomever you’d like to share your new report with!
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