Twitter Opens Up Analytics Dashboard Access For Social Media Stat Buffs

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
If you’ve ever wanted to know just how many people are reading that extremely cool, witty tweet you just sent out, Twitter has good news for you: the microblogging website has made its analytics tool available to all users.
The announcement was tweeted out Thursday by Twitter engineer Ian Chan, who wrote that he was “absolutely thrilled” to open up access to the website’s analytics dashboard. Previously, only advertisers and verified users could access the tool.
According to Trevor Mogg of Digital Trends, Twitter originally launched the analytics dashboard back in July. It allows users to check the number of times their tweets have been viewed by other users, the number of times that someone had engaged or interacted with the tweet (such as clicking on, retweeting or replying to it) and the engagement rate.
Furthermore, the Washington Post’s Jiaxi Lu reported Thursday that the dashboard also includes demographics about your followers, such as what percent of them are male/females, what their interests are, and where they’re located. It will take a little bit of digging to find those more detailed statistics, however.
Lu explains that opening the analytics tool will take users to a default page showing the number of people who viewed the tweets in your Twitter feed, and that in-depth analytics require clicking on the engagement tab. After doing so, you can see the total number of times that people clicked on your tweets, the number of clicks on your username or avatar, click on included links and hashtags, and real-time tracking of retweets and favorites, she added.
Finally, PC Magazine writer Angela Moscaritolo said that users can also download their tweet metrics if they want to spend extra time analyzing the data. Currently, the dashboard is available to users who tweet in English, French, Japanese, and Spanish and have been active in the past two weeks. However, “Twitter is working to roll it out to all users soon.”
“If you use your Twitter account to promote your business, the tool is certain to prove useful as it offers the opportunity to discover which kind of messages work best on the social media site,” Mogg said. “Twitter will be hoping for a knock-on effect too – as businesses and other high profile users utilize the tool to help them make more effective use of the microblogging service, this should lead to more engagement, which in turn should keep advertisers interested.”
Not everyone is 100 percent thrilled about the new feature, however. Martin Bryant of The Next Web said that while he was “impressed” by the new feature, he was also “a little concerned” that it could eventually cause “the human touch of Twitter” to be “stripped away as users regularly check their stats, seeing what tweets are most popular and tweaking their ‘strategy’ to get more ‘engagement’ and reach a wider audience.”
“It’s like video games – who doesn’t want to get a higher score?” he added. “Sure, we’ve had retweet and Favorite counts for some time (and some people’s tweets are definitely influenced by those), but the new analytics take data about our personal Twitter accounts to a whole new level. Even if we don’t deliberately change the way we tweet, subconsciously it could be a different story.”
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