It sounds like you’re still measuring tweets using engagement. After all, aren’t link clicks a form of engagement, for example? If someone clicks on your link, s/he engages with your tweet. Or are you using a narrow definition of engagement?

Great point Kim. I think you're spot on that the standard for "engagement" is shifting (ie: Twitter's new analytics dashboard defines clicks with any part of your Tweet as engagement, as you suggest), however, this isn't the standard or norm across all social networks yet, and for many social marketers, creating a common language and standardization across all of their channels is imperative (which is why "traditional" engagement is still focused on two things: interaction and amplification. Favorites, replies, and comments being in the former, retweet and shares being in the latter, for example). Using those traditional engagement metrics as the foundation for richer measurement gives some needed context to a lot of programs.

I'm with you here: I'm excited to see the shift to a broader definition of engagement. Tallying likes, comments, shares, retweets, pins, etc. is great and a key part of social analytics, but not the end-all success metric that analysts and marketers thought it would be a few years back. As networks offer richer data, and companies (like SM ;) ) focus on enabling deeper analysis, we can expect the standard definition of "engagement" to become richer as well. Thanks for the comment!

Good stuff. Linking Twitter metrics to Google Analytics is indeed one of the most useful things to do. Like for example marketing legend Drayton Bird mentioned that marketers top to dos should be "get more clients, get them buy more and keep them longer"...aaand if you can't measure the funnel, it's pretty hard to improve it as well. Some posts can get more engagements and visibility, but do they have anything to do with revenue, are they converting, is whole another story :)