Twitter launches new analytics tool that tells brands what users are saying about them

Twitter has launched a new tool out of beta that’s designed to help brands better understand just how much of the conversation on Twitter is focused around them. With its new Brand Hub, Twitter says marketers can now better understand their share of the conversation, key audience demographics, and pertinent trends. In short, brands have another analytics offering to help them understand why they’re using Twitter.

“Each tweet [sic] has the potential to give advertisers new insights to better understand what customers, prospects, and influencers are saying, thinking, and feeling about their brand,” Andrew Bragdon, a product manager in charge of tools to help Twitter generate revenue, wrote in a blog post. “To date, marketers haven’t been able to gather these valuable insights in one place.”

The Twitter Brand Hub provides metrics that help marketers glean insights from real-time conversations about their company. First off is TrueVoice, Twitter’s proprietary analytic that lets brands track real-time share of conversations. This metric is calculated by looking at the tweets around both a client’s brand and its competitor’s before identifying the percentage of impressions focused on the client’s brand.

The idea is that viewers who see an ad about Uber, for example, on TV, displays, and even on social media channels, stand a good likelihood of saying something about that brand — or its competitors — on Twitter. TrueVoice employs an algorithm that counts those tweets in real-time, to help brands gain perspective on the response those ads are generating.

Another offering within the Brand Hub is an audience view tool that provides insights into the people who are chatting about a particular brand on Twitter. Besides any private information available, marketers can find out the gender, location, income levels, occupation types, and other demographic information about these users. It’ll also showcase the top influencers, enabling brands to better engage with them.

Marketers can now ascertain whether their brand is most-talked about (or not), and by whom, but there’s one more piece of the analytics puzzle that brands are now being offered: the manner in which their companies are being discussed. Twitter’s Brand Hub analyzes brand impressions, how many tweets mention their brand or product, and in what context. Twitter said breakouts on brand loyalty, purchase intent, and other significant topics will be provided. And for large brands with subsidiaries (think Proctor & Gamble and Tide), data in Twitter’s Brand Hub can be segmented further.

As questions linger among marketers about what exactly Twitter is useful for, this Brand Hub can be an important tool, showing major advertisers that it can discern insights from all the chatter. During the Super Bowl, for example, beyond simply calculating hashtags, the Brand Hub will be able to provide brands with useful information about how Ford’s commercial fared against Toyota\s, or how Budweiser did against Bud Light.

The new Brand Hub is available for select large brand advertisers and medium-sized businesses within English-speaking countries.