Twitter rolls out analytics tools for everyone

Twitter says analytics are for everyone — not just advertisers and verified users.

Twitter engineer Ian Chan today announced that Twitter’s activity dashboard, a tool that gives select Twitter users insight into their feeds and followers, is rolling out to all users now.

The newly available dashboard gives users access to tons of stats about tweet impressions, engagement, retweets, and replies. The analytics tool also gives you fresh insight into who your followers are, where they’re located, and the types of people and organizations they follow. For instance, most of my followers are in New York.

Twitter refreshed its dashboard back in July. Before that it mostly monitored retweets and favorites. Now with the new dashboard, users can see how many people have viewed a tweet, how many people have clicked a link or hashtag you tweeted, and a breakdown of your followers by various criteria.

Though we knew this moment was coming, it’s unclear what Twitter’s motivation is for giving all of its many users access to its analytics dashboard.

But let’s take a stab in the dark with some speculation.

One of the biggest worries that’s been expressed in the media with this new dashboard is that it makes interacting with Twitter addictive. Being able to track your reception on Twitter gamifies the social experience, potentially ramping up user engagement. If you can see how well your tweets are doing, or how poorly, won’t that only push users to tweet more in attempts to best themselves and their peers?

At the moment, Twitter is mum on the issue, pointing only to a blog post that touts what Twitter’s new dashboard can do for you.