Twitter FAQs

Topics covered in this article:

• Twitter reach vs. Twitter impressions
• Preventing messages from appearing in your Smart Inbox
• Not seeing Twitter Comparison Report
• Data not appearing for Twitter Profile in Sprout
• Twitter Verification

What's the difference between Sprout Social's Twitter reach and Twitter's impressions?

If you use Sprout's Post Performance reporting, you may notice that Sprout's Reach statistic is normally much higher than Twitter's "Impressions" number. This is due to how the Sprout platform gathers and calculates Tweet performance.

Sprout calculates a Tweet's reach by the number of followers you have when you post the message, plus the number of followers of each person who retweets your Tweet. Because it's likely that your Tweet won't be seen by all of those people, this is considered the potential maximum reach.

Twitter, on the other hand, knows exactly when a Tweet was seen in a user's timeline, so they can give a more accurate Impressions number. However, they can only determine if a Tweet was viewed when it's served by an official Twitter platform (their website and official mobile apps, for example). So their number can be considered the very minimum number of times it was seen.

Using both the Post Performance Report in Sprout Social and Twitter's own analytics together can give you a good idea of how many times your Tweet was seen. 

Can I prevent messages from certain Twitter users from showing in my inbox?

Yes by leveraging Brand Keywords.  You can learn more about Brand Keywords by reading this helpful article.

Include search operators in your Brand Keywords to help filter out irrelevant messages and zero in on the keyword matches that are important to your business. To make sure you don't see messages from a specific Twitter user, you can use the - operator to remove any of their results from your keyword results. For example:

Sprout -from:SproutGKeenan

This brand keyword/search operator string example would pull in messages from Twitter that contain the word Sprout, as long as they weren't from the handle @SproutGKeenan:

Why isn't my Twitter Comparison Report showing?

Comparison reports can sometimes take up to 24 hours for Sprout to access that competitor or handle data from Twitter.

If you still don't see data after 24 hours, let us know by contacting Sprout Support, and we can look into this further.

Why can't I see data for my Twitter profile?

Sprout integrates with Twitter via an API, to pass data between the two platforms. Based on how Twitter has built their API, there are a few important things to note regarding how Sprout can receive this data: 

• Sprout begins gathering data from your Twitter account as soon as you connect it, and in some cases it can take 24 hours to appear.  
• Due to limitations in Twitter’s API, Sprout only has access to data from the day you connect your Twitter account. Sprout can't get past historical data.
• Twitter does not provide historical data so the full 7-day and 30-day statistics aren't available until you have been with Sprout for those respective periods.

Twitter Verification

Sprout is not able to verify Twitter profiles. You will have to get in touch with Twitter's Support team for this. You can visit this link for more information.