Twitter is now starting to beta test its official analytics product with a select group of users. This comes five months after their acquisition of Trendly - an analytics dashboard for Twitter.
No date has been announced as to when this feature will be launched to all Twitter users (stay tuned), although I'm anticipating to see it in early 2011.
Here's what the free version of Twitter Analytics offers today.
Timeline Activity Dashboard
We can see from the screenshot below that Twitter Analytics will track: Mentions; Retweets; Replies; Follows and Unfollows; and Favorites. It will also graph some of this data in a bar chart in 6-hour increments.
Promoted Tweets Dashboard
Given this dedicated section, it appears that a big motivation behind Twitter Analytics, is to help advertisers gauge what they're getting from advertising through Twitter.
In this dashboard you can see the number of Impressions, Clicks, Retweets, and Replies over a selected date range. You have the option to graph by 6-hour increments, by day, and by week.
What This Means
- Many third-party Twitter applications that focus on tracking Twitter metrics will soon become obsolete.
- Twitter is becoming more "business-friendly". This is especially true if we see Google Analytics integration from Twitter, which is a possibility given that Trendly worked with GA.
- Average Twitter users may start to become obsessed with being more "influential". 🙂