Twitter: keep your analytics for brands only

Twitter first launched its analytics dashboard last month for advertisers, Twitter Card publishers and verified users only.

It broadened an existing set of free analytics, which previously only offered data on Twitter ads, not organic tweets.

The dashboard is a highly useful service for marketers to get an idea of their most popular posts and to aggregate performance data over a period of time. It lessens their reliance on third party companies, who often charge for their analytics tools.

But is it useful for users, beyond a quick navel gaze? The jury’s still out.

Beyond the likelihood that the average Twitter user will only use what is no doubt a server-hungry tool once or twice, Twitter appears to have overlooked the possibility that opening up the service to everyone cheapens its offer to paying advertisers.

Twitter may well have been looking to foster better ties with the SMB community, who aren’t yet big enough to become paying advertisers or have verified accounts – but perhaps a simple registration page so businesses could apply to be approved for access to the free service would have been a better move.

Twitter is often praised in the marketing community for making marketers feel special, especially compared with some of the other digital media titans. Marketers and agencies regularly tell me that they have close relationships with some of Twitter UK’s top bods and feel they are almost always on hand for advice and even supplier recommendations, while its rivals can be faceless entities despite gobbling up bigger proportions of their ad budget.

Twitter needs to continue to make marketers feel they are getting something from the service they help to fund. But opening up a tool that was previously just for the marketing community to absolutely everyone doesn’t feel like good value for money.