Twitter has unveiled Engage, a standalone analytics app that is able to provide real-time data and insights on the social media platform.
The app is geared toward celebrities and power users, collectively known by Twitter as "popular creators," with the tool aiming to assist them in their interactions with their followers and help in the growth and retention of their audience.
Engage allows celebrities to never miss important conversations, with the most important follows and mentions from loyal fans and other influencers tracked by the tool. Engage also reviews all the content and activity posted by the celebrity, allowing them to track the performance of each of their posts and to continue conversations based on their content.
In essence, what Engage does is filter through all the tweets generated by a celebrity's followers, which could easily reach millions. Instead, what celebrities will see are the mentions that they want to see, along with all-important metrics.
The app also shows the performance of the user's account and its audience through statistics such as the number of retweets, mentions and video views. Deeper analytics include allowing access to the demographics of the Twitter account's audience, along with a real-time feed for the tweets of the account's followers.
What is not included in Engage, however, is a timeline. While the exclusion of such a feature on the app could be seen as isolating the user from a huge chunk of the social media platform, celebrities may welcome the absence of a timeline, as it would allow them to focus on the content that they broadcast. Besides, most popular Twitter accounts are one-sided in nature, and celebrities will not have the time to read through all the tweets from their thousands or millions of followers that would appear on their timeline.
The Engage app is currently only available for users on the iOS and is also only accessible through the United States version of Apple's App Store. There is no mention on when the tool will be released for Android and in markets outside the United States.
Twitter's Engage looks similar to Facebook's Mentions, which is an app that was released by the social network about two years ago. However, the difference is that Mentions requires a verified account on Facebook, while Engage is open for all Twitter users. In addition, Mentions functions as the main Facebook app with the additional capability of monitoring whenever a user uploads a post containing the user's name, while Engage has a deeper analytics focus.
