Twitter releases analytics tool for advertisers

Twitter released a tool for analyzing tweets on Friday. This makes it possible for advertisers to see how often a tweet has been viewed and with which device that has happened.

Twitter rolled out the activity dashboard Friday to advertisers and users with verified accounts. The latter group includes celebrities and media companies.

The social network leave know in a blog post that with the dashboard it is possible to see how tweets are doing in real time. This makes it possible to check how often a message has been viewed and how often that has happened with a certain device, such as an iOS or Android device. You can also see how often someone takes a look at an account and the number of retweets per account can be compared with previous months. Finally, it is possible to export the data to a CSV file.

Twitter is not the only social network that offers such functionalities. Facebook has been doing this for some time with Insights, while Google has Analytics for YouTube, for example. Twitter hopes that advertisers will use the tool to better tailor tweets to their target audience, making the microblogging service attractive for commercial use.

Although Twitter is not open about this, it seems that the analysis tool stems from Gnip, which the American company bought in April. Gnip gives companies insight into social media posts; for example, the company collects all messages on Twitter in real time. The service can also estimate which tweets are of interest to a customer.