For Twitter, This Changes Everything
It’s not entirely new and it’s not entirely unique. Third-party providers like TwitterAnalyzer and Klout had already been providing some statistical feedback for Twitter for some time. CrowdBooster, a new service, promises to do even more. But the launch of Twitter’s own Analytics service is going to change everything.
The service, unlike some third-party services, is likely to be free. That’s bad news for developers, good news for the rest of us.
It’s good news because that information is going to be really interesting for anyone serious about marketing through Twitter.
According to early reports, Twitter Analytics will reveal the identities of your most influential followers (the people who tend to reply and retweet your messages) as well as which tweets caused people to unfollow. Judging by the services offered by competitors, it also likely that you’ll be able to figure out the best times to tweet and the number of people individual tweets have reached.
That’s all hugely valuable stuff.
Knowing exactly when to tweet will ensure that your message doesn’t go out at a time when few of your followers are online. It maximizes the power of your message.
Seeing exactly what caused people to turn off will help you to remain diplomatic and keep your numbers rising.
Understanding the identities of your most important followers will let you know who to reply to and who to keep on board.
You probably have a good, general idea about all of those things. But having precise figures to back up your intuition is always a good thing.
I can see that I’m going to be spending a lot of time playing with Twitter Analytics when it rolls out. But there is a danger here.
Twitter isn’t about numbers. It’s about relationships. And relationships have to be built on honesty and authenticity.
I know that when I tweet about religion or politics, I lose a few followers. That’s fine. I’m political and I’m religious, so ignoring those aspects of who I am would be false. And while Twitter Analytics will tell me how many people saw my tweet and how many replied to it, it won’t tell me what people felt when they saw it or what they think of me.
It can’t measure the depth of my relationship with them.
And there’s one more figure it won’t tell me either: how much I enjoy using Twitter.
That’s vital. Twitter is best when it’s fun, and that’s as true of business use as it is of personal use. Playing with the statistics will be interesting but if the figures clash with the fun, I’m probably going to stick with the fun.
