Twitter Analytics: Why Aren't These Stats Offered To Everyone?

Back in late 2010, news about Twitter’s Analytics platform started heating up. Twitter had begun to invite influential users to try it out, and according to an article on Mashable, analytics were supposed to debut before the end of the year. I had the opportunity to test out the tool when I took part in the Twitter Ads beta (each account that ran ads was automatically allowed access to analytics). The platform showed the number of favorites, retweets and replies on each tweet that was sent, plus mentions, follows and unfollows on the account and some basic demographic and psychographic information on the account’s followers. However, fast forward two years later and Twitter Analytics is still not available on most accounts. What happened?

Twitter has been mum on the subject, and their official developer’s blog has not provided any concrete details on when, or if, Twitter Analytics will ever be released to all users. Twitter offers no analytics of any sort, so many third-part applications have popped up that provide analytics data. However, the ones that provide the best insights inevitably cost money, usually in the form of a subscription fee. Without using a third-party app, trying to track something as simple as follower growth or @mentions per week is impossible unless someone manually counts the information. Twitter limits the data returned from search results, so it becomes nearly impossible to track actionable data without spending some amount of money.

For most individual users, the lack of data is just an inconvenience, but for brands and digital marketing agencies, it is a huge issue. It’s not like Twitter Analytics is still in development; advertisers have had access to it for years now. So why not open it up to all brands, like Facebook has done with their fan pages? Given that Facebook offers all of its fan pages’ analytics data for free, it is odd that Twitter cannot provide the same for its brands. Do you think Twitter should offer basic analytics to some or all of its users? Were you even aware that Twitter had an analytics platform?