As a community manager, analytics act as our compass, our teacher, our friend. When Facebook increased their insights, at first we all groaned at deciphering the insanely filled excel downloads, but now knowing every detail about our pages leaves us feeling empowered. Thank you Facebook for giving these to us. For free. (Hint hint, nudge nudge Twitter).
Insights aid in improving your content strategy - letting you know exactly what you consumers are engaging with, how they are sharing it and basically lets brands "get-to-know" their fans. With these - brands have been able to increase the quality of their pages.
Twitter has great analytics, but only accounts giving $25K would know that. Sadly, along with page verification, Twitter analytics are reserved for those brands with tons of ad spend, but to those little guys - sorry!
This is unfortunate - almost a sad circle that these smaller brands can get stuck in on Twitter. Without any ad spend, your channel won't grow large enough and influential enough to make a case for a larger ad budget, but without a large out ad budget you can't grow your channel enough...yada yada yada.
When do we predict this will happen? Hard to say. It was less than 2 years ago when Twitter analytics were even rumored, so should we expect then to continue capitalizing on this for a few more years? Most likely - especially with social ad spend expecting to reach almost $10 billion by 2016 (whew!).
So for those who don't have $25K lying around - how do you measure your brand's Twitter channel? Twitter counter? Social Bro? The Archivist?
Would love to hear which Twitter analytics programs are working best for you!