Twitter Gives Bird to Third-party Analytics Apps

by Lily Bradic

This week, Twitter opened its Analytics dashboard to all users. The dashboard, previously only available to Twitter Ads users, allows anyone with a Twitter account that isn’t banned, protected, or under two weeks old to access their account’s statistics. 

​For brands and individuals that can’t (or don’t) pay for third-party Twitter analytics tools like Twitalyzer, TweetReach and Followerwonk, this is good news — but we can’t imagine the people behind the apps in question are very happy. Twitter Analytics offers pretty much everything third-party analytics tools do, including:

• Number of impressions per Tweet
• Engagement rate over time
• Number of favorites, retweets and replies
• Graph showing number of followers
• Follower breakdown by interest, location, age, and gender

So, what does that mean for your business?

If you’re already using Facebook Page Insights and Google Page Analytics (and you should be), you’ll already be familiar with most features. By tracking your Tweets’ engagement, you can find what type of posts are most appealing to your audience, what time of day to post, and whether your actions are causing you to lose or gain followers.

On its own, Twitter Analytics could leave you with a lot of data and no way of working with it — which is why it’s best used alongside a listening and automation tool like Hootsuite or SproutSocial. Use Twitter Analytics data to inform your post schedule, decide which hashtags to track, and then check Analytics again to see how effective your strategy is. 

Readers: are you currently using a third-party analytics tool? Will you be swapping it for Twitter’s own? Leave a comment to let us know!