Twitter to Roll Out Free Analytics Tool This Year

Twitter will start offering a real-time analytics tool to its users which will start testing later this year. The tool will highlight viral tweets, influential users and other trends in real-time. The feature will apparently be offered for free.

Web analytics company WebTrends reported that Twitter's business development exec Ross Hoffman announced at the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit that it plans to launch an analytics feature in the fourth quarter.

The feature will have a small roll out at first. Since this was a sports event, the announcement said that people in sports will get access to the feature. It can be safely assumed that it will be made available for everyone at a later point.

Twitter regularly beta tests new features with a small number of users as they are being developed to ensure that the teams working on them get real-world feedback.

While the beta test is scheduled to start in the last quarter, there's no date for a wider roll out.

An analytics tool has been rumored to be a part of Twitter's plans for quite a while, most recently this summer when it acquired Trendly, makers of an analytics dashboard.

Twitter isn't confirming anything at the moment, except for the fact that it has been thinking at an analytics tool for some while now.

Twitter has said that analytics was one of the ways it plans to make money. This was a full year ago when the company was still talking about premium accounts.

Apparently, those are still on the table, though the company has went ahead with other monetization schemes, particularly the one thing it vowed to never to do - advertising.

The new analytics tools will actually leverage the same Twitter Resonance algorithm it uses to determine the top tweets as well as how well a Promoted Ad is doing.