Twitter May Soon Show Your Tweets’ Stats

The Experimental Phase Continues

Twitter are toying with a new update that will allow us to see individual tweets’ statistics, straight from the tweet itself. This was foreshadowed when Twitter first began its current phase of ‘experimenting’ with new features. They've been hit and miss, with universal praise for Twitter's Audio Card music streaming feature, but internet tears by the half-trillions for their introduction of tweets into our news feeds from people we aren’t actively following and, more recently, their decision to start snooping on our downloaded apps to bring us more tailored ads. Yay.

source: freevector.com

The good news is that Twitter have just announced another brand new feature, and this one seems like a good’un. Since near enough the network’s inception, people have been using third party applications to make it an even more powerful tool for personal networking and marketing. Recently, however, Twitter appear to be on something of a mad one in their attempts to eradicate our need to turn to third parties when delving into our Twitterstistics.

First, they're now letting us search through every tweet ever made, multiplying the amount of data stored by their servers massively. This was a huge investment, and it offered nothing but positive benefits to Twitter's users (although some comments claimed they found it creepy, which, personally, I found slightly unfair). Today’s announcement, which detailed a stat-tracking feature that will roll out to only a small percentage of users initially (as per usual for Twitter), is another one that's only good news for us. 

source: techcrunch.com

Assuming it does get a full release (many Twitter tweaks never make it past the first wave of users, and if they do, they often become disappointingly underutilised), we’ll soon be able to check out tonnes of statistics about the posts we make on a tweet-by-tweet basis. 

Curious whether the link you shared actually received any hits? Once upon a time, you'd have had to go to the trouble of warming up some third party software (sometimes for a fee), inputting your details and getting to grips with its UI before finding out for a fact that nobody actually cares about the stuff you share. 

Now you'll be able do all that within the tweet itself, and the cold, hard realisation that you've been completely wasting your time will come freely and instantly. 

source: agbeat.com

This will all initially work within Twitter's iOS app, but it’s safe to presume that it’ll eventually be usable through Android and, indeed, PC (although not Windows Phone or Blackberry, because screw Windows Phone and Blackberry). To use it, all you will have to do is flick your way down to the bottom of one of your tweets and click on the “View Analytics Details” button. Boom. More stats than you could shake a stick at.

These features will be hugely beneficial for anyone who cares about things like ROI and SEO and other business-y sounding Web 2.0 initialisms. If you're not bothered, great. Continue to ignore it. If you do care, that’s also great. Although maybe not, as you have to remember that the majority of Twitter's zany plans never actually come to fruition.

Emile Cole

Emile is a postgrad from the University of Saint Mark and Saint John. He’s hoping to break into journalism or publishing, and won’t stop blogging until he’s managed it! Follow him @EmileAtSMF.

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