Netizens expressed disappointment and confusion over the latest analytics feature presented by
Twitter on September 6, 2012. The micro-blogging social media site listed
new and revised features to its platform on its advertising blog.
Tweeting Merged With Marketing
A more notable change involves allowing independent advertisers to pick the tweets that they wish to promote. Online marketers can specifically indicate the tweets where they intend to invest in. Before, they had no choice but to include those that weren?t related to their business or weren't generating income.
Twitter's advertising team used to select the promoted tweets for online users, depending on the most interesting or related posts. However, while having advertisers decide on the specific marketing content comes with a lot of advantages and conveniences, many users already know that it was a service that was long overdue. Many third-party applications had already adopted the quick and easy approach to marketing on the micro-blogging site that Twitter's own offering had seemed redundant.
Tracking Tweets Over Time
The second feature involves the creation of graphs where online advertisers can view how their followers increase over a period of time.
It might be interesting or even beneficial for many but the element was supposed to have already been part of Twitter for a long time. It's quite surprising how the development team only came up with the idea just now. Hashtags.org, in particular, has been hosting a well-defined graphing and analytics feature for months now.
Using the graphs, advertisers can observe the number of people following them over a number of days, weeks or months. They can also distinctly observe the paid followers and those that are acquired for free. Followers are generally categorized between
organic and acquired via Promoted Products.
Many Twitter users say they do not expect much from the graphs. They might just see the basic layout without further information on the specifics of the data. The charts are exclusively available in the self-service solution for small business in the meantime.
Twitter had already indicated about two years ago that an analytics product was going to be launched to better help users keep track of their followers. Until now, people have been depending on third party applications to gain more information, including specifics.
The recent analytics feature is nothing really impressive for many regular users. Promoted Tweets have long been used by online entrepreneurs and marketers to keep their target market informed and interested in their products and offers.
Generally, these are investments that matter to the growth and success of online businesses and other types of industries -- and Twitter should have launched these features long before others had already carved their own niches.
