Twitter Launches Analytics For All and Highlight Reels You Can Edit

Last week Twitter unveiled two tools that should be of interest to anyone using Twitter for marketing purposes. One was an analytics feature within Twitter Ads that wasn't officially announced and doesn't require you to buy ads to use. The other is an officially approved product powered by Vizify called #FollowMe that allows you to create video highlight reels from your Twitter stream with music via Friendly Music.

Twitter Analytics

Given the interest in social media analytics among people who wish to reduce guesswork regarding their web activities, an official Twitter analytics tool has been long overdue. A new analytics feature that wasn't officially announced by Twitter was discovered in the wild by Twitter Ads users last week.

You can check it out for yourself at Twitter Ads by logging in with your regular account login and choosing "Timeline activity" or "Followers" from the drop-down "Analytics" menu.

Here you can find such info as how many times each tweet was favorited, retweeted or received a reply. You can also see how many time the link within a tweet was clicked. Other stats include a timeline of how many times you were mentioned as well as the number of follows and unfollows over a month or so of tweeting.

I was able to check out the above Timeline activity but got the message that there wasn't enough data to display follower info. However you can see an example here that shows overall follower growth and tells you more about your followers such as interests, location and gender.

You don't have to buy ads to use it but clearly Twitter added it to Twitter Ads because that's a product for customers not users.

Twitter Highlight Reels

Twitter officially announced #FollowMe, a somewhat poorly named product given that this hashtag is already widely in use. I'm sure there are a variety of takes on this issue but, generally speaking, I think using a hashtag for the name of any product is kind of weak.

That said, #FollowMe is a pretty cool way to present highlights from your time on Twitter. It's powered by Vizify who don't seem to be calling it #FollowMe on their site. Audio is provided by Friendly Music. After Vizify creates the initial video you can go in and make content choices and change the music.

Kobe Bryant's video is being currently promoted and that will give you an idea of how it works. I would have embedded it in this post but they don't seem to allow embedding.

In fact, the lack of embedding helps explain why I haven't been hearing much of anything about Vizify even though they've been around for a couple of years and seem to be making some fun things that I could otherwise see going viral.

Twitter says you can add it to your Twitter bio (do they mean profile?) and it also shows up in tweets as a Twitter Card: for example.

So go make your Vizify/Twitter video and link to it in the comments.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.