The X (Twitter) data in your Social Media Management dashboards might differ from the data that X (Twitter) itself reports through their X (Twitter) Analytics tool. This article explains the causes for these discrepancies.
Total impressions
Your Content Performance Widget in Social Media Management can report on the Total Impressions for all posts (tweets) in a given date range. The Widget shows this total at the top of your Impressions column. If this data is compared to the same metric in X (Twitter) Analytics, it is likely that the X (Twitter) number is higher.
The cause for this discrepancy is the fact that X (Twitter) automatically includes the impressions for Replies, as well as your posts. Replies are the posts that are made as a reply to another post so that a X (Twitter) thread is created. These replies can receive Impressions and X (Twitter) automatically includes them in your totals.
At Social Media Management, we've chosen to exclude the impressions from Replies since it aligns with how other networks, such as Facebook, report on Impressions.
Date range definition
If you report on the same date range in X (Twitter) as in Social Media Management, there might also be discrepancies due to differences in how the date range includes or excludes content.
In Social Media Management, the date range determines which posts are included in the calculation of your data. For X (Twitter), it only pertains to when the data itself was generated. To make this easier to understand, here's an example:
Let's say your date range in Social Media Management and on X (Twitter) is set to the last 4 days. In Social Media Management, this means that all posts that were created in the last 4 days are included in your reporting. Any total metrics, such as Total Impressions, are calculated based on all the Impressions for the posts that were created in the last 4 days.
In contrast, X (Twitter) will not take the creation date of a post into account. It will simply look at the total number of Impressions you received in the last 4 days. If a post was created 10 days ago, but received Impressions in the last 4 days, it will still appear in the report and it will be counted towards the Total Impressions metric for the last 4 days.
7 day limit
Finally, a third cause for slight discrepancies could be stemming from the limitations of some of the X (Twitter) APIs that Social Media Management uses to retrieve your data.
Social Media Management can track the performance of each post for a period of 7 days. If the content receives impressions and engagement after this 7-day period, the data is not reflected in Social Media Management.
Please bear in mind that almost all post show a very steep decline in impressions and engagement after a few hours to a few days, which means that the impact of this limitation on reporting is minimal.
Engagements
When reporting natively on X (Twitter), Engagements is defined as: All clicks on your post. However, in Social Media Management, Engagements considers only your post's likes, replies and reposts (retweets). Clicks are not included. To include clicks in your reporting, choose Interactions instead.