Opening Up Twitter Analytics to All – Smart Marketing Move ala Google

Is Twitter the right place for your social media investment?

Whether you have time or ad dollars to spend, this is a question that marketers are visiting and revisiting as the demand for social media performance increases.

According to Twitter, 35% of consumers that follow a brand are more likely to purchase from that brand. Twitter users are also 47% more likely to visit the company’s website and 35% are more likely to retweet content from a business they follow.

Is Twitter right for you? How do you know the performance of your Twitter engagement and marketing activities?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to Twitter Analytics without having to advertise?

Yes, it would. And now you can.

Last week I caught a tweet from Danny Olson @mrdolson that Twitter Analytics was available to anyone with a Twitter account, not just advertisers.

This story was coved by the tech media, but in case you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s pretty easy to view the Twitter Analytics for any account you have access to: While logged in to the Twitter account you’re curious about, visit the Twitter ads page and click on Analytics in the top navigation.

I think this is a smart move in the way that Google offered Analytics for free was a smart move. Making information more easily available with the option to start advertising just a click away equates to making it easier to spend money with Twitter.  According to BuiltWith, there are over 13 million websites, or 16% of all sites on the internet, using Google Analytics. A huge number of those site owners rely on Google for important data to make business decisions about their online marketing.

The trust engendered and the access to new, qualified customers is substantial when making this kind of data available for free. Will the same adoption occur with Twitter? A lot more features than what are currently available will need to be added in order for that to happen I think. That is not to say current Twitter Analytics data isn’t useful, because it is. But a basic timeline of activity and follower trends is not exactly remarkable.

The two views are Timeline Activity and Followers.  The Timeline info can be downloaded as a CSV file so you can work your spreadsheet magic on it.

The Timeline Activity tab shows a bar chart of mentions over the past 30 days along with follows and unfollows over the same time period. Putting your cursor over anywhere in the timeline reveals the mentions, follows and unfollows for that day.

A never ending scroll river of news style list of recent activity is displayed as well with a count for Faves, Reweets, and Replies for each. You can also filter the recent tweets list by Best, Good or All to see the top 15% of tweets with the most activity vs. viewing them chronologically.

The Followers tab shows a trendline over the past year of followers. Below are details on the percentages of top 5 “Most unique interests” of your followers, the top 10 interests of your followers, the top countries, U.S. States, and Cities of your followers, a breakdown of Gender and a list of the top 10 Twitter accounts that your followers also follow.  Putting your cursor over any of these data points displays the specific counts.  The Followers data is not downloadable as CSV but you can easily scrape or copy the page.

What do you think? Will you start using the Analytics option within Twitter or will you continue to use the social media analytics tools you already have in place? Or maybe you’re not using any social media analytics tools at all?

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