As Twitter further establishes itself as the favored platform for disseminating news around current events, the social networking site has opened up to all users the ability to gauge the reach and reception of their tweets.
After roughly two months of testing the analytics dashboard with advertisers and holders of verified accounts, all Twitter users can sign up for the free service. The Tweet dashboard crunches data on impressions, instances of tweets delivered to another party's feed, and total engagement, the sum of the times other users interacted with posted content.
The analytics dashboard enables users to track the number of views their tweets have received, the amount of times their posts have been favorited, a count of retweets and tally of the times their profiles have been viewed by others. Users of the dashboard can also analyze the history of their tweets, comparing weeks or months side-by-side to isolate trends.
"On Twitter, nothing comes between your Tweets and your followers," stated Twitter when it opened the dashboard up to advertisers in June. "The Tweet activity dashboard can help you create content that resonates most with these followers, who have the ability to amplify your brand's message even further through actions like a Retweet, mention or reply."
Twitter has released a guide to orient users as they learn their way around the dashboard. The guide also includes a glossary of terms often associated with analytics.
Along with the help guide, Twitter has offered some basic advice on improving the reception of tweets. Twitter analyzed the accounts of 200 brands on the social networking site to determine the best practices for levering the dashboard and producing more effective tweets.
Pay attention to the time of the day and week tweets are posted, find the sweet spot with tweet frequency and figure out which content formatting draws the most positive attention, Twitter recommends.
Twitter determined that the most successful of the analyzed brands referenced current events, mentioned influential tweeters and included photos or videos along with text.
While the analytics dashboards was an experiment that has been well received in general, Twitter's trial run of broadcasting favorited tweets to timelines spurred backlash from the social network's users, Tech Times reported. Twitter said upgrades to its core has enabled it to run test more frequently.
"We're able to run tests more frequently because we've built a more robust experimentation framework, which we use to run tests not only on the web, but also in our mobile apps: Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android," stated Twitter.
