14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been slowly evolving lately adding more features, more functionality and, more importantly, starting to generate some revenue. The company is now working on an integrated analytics solution to help users gauge the popularity of their tweets, who are their most influential followers and so on.
The new feature has been rumored before and is now rolling out to a few select users. Twitter has confirmed the feature but is only testing it with a few people and has no clear deadline or schedule for rolling it out more widely.
"We gave a very small group of Twitter users access to a simple and straightforward analytics dashboard, as part of an alpha test. This first group of testers includes users who have worked with Twitter and are doing interesting things with their Twitter accounts," Twitter said when asked about the feature.
"We’re experimenting with tools like this to give users insight on how to make their Tweets more compelling for Twitter users, and we don’t have a timeline for wider distribution," it added.
While Twitter calls the analytics feature "simple," it's actually looking rather compelling even in this early test.
The dashboard shows how other users interact with your account, the number of mentions, broken down by six-hour increments, and the number of people following or unfollowing the account.
You can also filter your tweets by "Best," "Good" and "All" to see how are they performing. Another interesting aspect is that the tool enables you to see the performance of your Promoted Tweets, giving a hint at who the new feature is aimed at, primarily.
Companies paying Twitter for sponsored tweets or trends should be able to measure how well those tweets are performing. While there are no plans to roll out the analytics tool to a wider audience any time soon, the tool is offered for free for now and that is unlikely to change.