Over this past weekend SHIFT Communications executive Christopher S. Penn discovered that Twitter has a free analytical tool buried within its advertising menu. The service was announced previously, but users may not have noticed as it isn’t the easiest to spot. The tool is well fleshed out with many features that marketers are currently purchasing through third-party providers.
Within the platform’s tool, users can see a more in-depth look at their follower count while also tracking how well certain tweets are performing. Its interface is divided into two sections: Timeline Activity and Followers. The Timeline Activity shows four to six weeks worth of data, including follow and unfollow stats as well as Tweet statistics like Favorites, Retweets, Replies, and click-throughs.
Users can quickly sort the most engaging Tweets by “good” (top two out of three) and “best” (top 15 percent). The Followers section includes demographic information on users’ followers such as gender, location, and interests. The last section includes a brief overview of a user’s entire Twitter history.
Most of the data can be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet for your records.
“What’s annoying is that the CSV download contains none of the follow/unfollow data,” wrote Penn in his review of the service. “You only get Favorites, Retweets, and Replies, making the use of third party tools like link shorteners still mandatory.”
To locate the tool, mouse over to the Ads homepage (notice no sign of any analytical functionality). Then direct to Analytics and find Timeline Activity.
