Twitter Adds New Feature Giving Users a Look at their Data

Working in social media, I have to say that one of the most rewarding things to see is a client’s campaign flourish with ‘likes’ and re-tweets. In our line of work, our client’s goal is our priority and with Facebook insights and other tools, we’ve been allowed to see the demographics of users that interact most with our page and can custom build a campaign to fit a client’s niche. This feature has definitely allowed us to gain a stronger handle on how our campaign is doing; however, Twitter hasn’t given users an inside view into their twitter statistics…until now.

Twitter recently announced that they were implementing a Web analytics dashboard. The dashboard will consist of four tabs:

1. Traffic: this tab will correlate information between the number of tweets linking to a site against the number of people actually clicking those links. There will also be a graph that measures this information with the following options; one day, the week and the past month.
2.  Tweets: this tab will display all tweets containing links to a site, including any tweets sent from the site’s embedded Tweet button.
3. Tweet Button: this tab displays interaction and engagement a site gets from its Tweet button.
4. Content: this tab compiles the site’s top-performing pages.

It will be nice to be able to see how this is being shared in the Twittersphere, the amount of traffic (or Twaffic) being referred and measure the amount of interaction a Web site generates with the Tweet button.

Since we will be waiting a few more weeks before the release of the new dashboard, third-party applications like HootSuite will still be of great use in measuring tweet data and scheduling tweets ahead of time, which is a magical feature that has allowed us to release tweets during certain times of the day that draw in more interaction.

Another cool thing about this announcement is that Twitter is planning to release an API for Web Analytics, allowing users to integrate this data into other analytic applications like Trendly. If you have had a chance to play around with Facebook Insights, there’s the option to download the data into an excel sheet. It will be interesting to see how Twitter will present the data as a deliverable for clients and marketing coordinators, since we all understand the importance of getting a return on investment.

Garrett will be conducting a free Facebook Security and Privacy webinar on Oct. 26th