How to track the retweets of any Tweet

Intro

Ellen DeGeneres’ photos of the 2014 Oscars, portraying a bunch of Hollywood superstars, marked a record and still is in the top 5 most quoted tweets of all times, with 3+ million retweets.

While likes on social media make anyone feel warm, sharing is the real powerhouse. Thanks to its compounding effect, Retweeting is a super powerful tool to promote your product and quickly boost your brand awareness.

In this short guide, we’ll walk you through all the steps to build a report to track any Tweet’s retweets, all in a spreadsheet.

Here is a sneak peek of what you will get:

Twitter engagement glossary

Before getting started, let's briefly go through some definitions. As a business, Twitter offers its community a broad range of actions to engage with your social media activity:

• Follow. Following an account puts it on your feed and allows you to get updated when it posts new content.
• Like. Use it to show appreciation or endorsement of specific posts.
• Retweet. Use it to re-share some content to your follower base, ignite discussions, and support a cause.
• Reply. Through reply, you can directly add a personal comment below any Tweet.
• Share. Use it to share the link to a specific Tweet with anyone outside Twitter.

Based on these actions, some relevant metrics are computed:

• Impressions. The total number of times a Tweet is displayed in the timeline or search results.
• Engagement. The sum of all interactions a tweet has triggered (mainly likes and retweets, but also replies, expansions, hashtags clicks,...) defines the so-called engagement of a tweet.
• Engagement rate. All engagements divided by the impressions of a Tweet. It represents a measure of how reactive your follower base is.
• Link clickthrough. The total number of times a link in a Tweets has been clicked.

Let's go

First of all, use our template at the following link Retweets tracker and save it in one of your workspace's folders.

This template allows you to have a quick list of any retweets of a Tweet, thus helping you to monitor your or your competitor's engagement activity.

Let's reverse-engineer it together.

First of all, you need to enable the data connection and connect your Twitter account to Rows. Click on the top modal and then follow the instructions. The typical Twitter Auth page will open: enter your Twitter handle and password, and authorize Rows to retrieve your data.

Now you are back on the spreadsheet, ready to set it up. In cell B1 of the Search table, past the link of the Tweet your want to track

Cell B2 displays the text of the above tweet, through the following function

1                =PARSE(SEARCH_RETWEETS_TWITTER(B1),"[0].['text']")

Cell B3 displays the total number of retweets, through to the following function:

1                =PARSE(SEARCH_RETWEETS_TWITTER(B1),"[0].['retweet_count']")

The "Retweets" table is designed to show insights about anyone who retweeted the picked tweet. It is built using our Action menu, it is backed by and synced with data coming from our SEARCH_RETWEETS_TWITTER() function and it comes with a daily built-in refresh schedule, that automatically fetches new data every day, if available.

The current table includes the following data:

• Date. The timestamp of the retweet.
  
• Tweet URL. The URL of the retweet.
  
• Username. The username of the user that retweeted our post
  
• Text. The text of the retweet, which may contain a comment above the shared Tweet or not
  
• Location. Where the user who retweeted is based
• Description. Its description, as displayed on its profile
• Followers. Its number of followers
• Likes. The total number of likes it gave
• Verified. A parameter, TRUE/FALSE, that indicates whether the account is verified or not
• Profile URL. The URL of the profile who retweeted

You can always modify the metrics displayed, by clicking on the ... in the top right corner of the table. The Action menu will open on the right and allow you to customize the table.

Column renaming and ordering is available directly on the table, through cell editing and dragging.

Due to specific constraints of Twitter APIs, only a limited number of retweets are fetched.

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