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Comment by datacog | Hacker News Reader

It does not. I came to know this tool while using Twitter ads (they had a $50 promotion). Seems the strategy is to engage with analytics and push towards promoting tweets. But I havent seen/read much about this tool. They need to develop it much more to give out useful analytics (try comparing this with facebook's page analytics)

Here are the shortcomings of the tool:

- Clicks on URL: It shows the overall clicks on the url, if you use it multiple times, it will be summed up

- No reach metrics for your tweets

- Filters: No filters on date ranges, difficult to dig out tweets

- No sorting of tweets by number of retweets etc.

- No sentiment analysis

All of these shortcomings could result into 2-3 products itself.

Some useful things are:

- Follower trends

- Interests and segmentation of your followers

- High level overview of how your tweets are doing.

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The listed shortcomings all sound like features that over time should be developed by Twitter. Assuming those features are value adding.

This reminds me when Google Analytics stormed onto the market. Many analytic companies expired. Those that evolved had to aggressively compete and label them self at enterprise level with more features and integrations. However in web analytics space Google did not own those websites being monitored so there was opportunity left for the client analytic companies.

Competing with Twitter analytics is like a company trying to build a business around Facebook Insights and trying to compete with them. Might work in the short term but long term the odds of survival are low.

> The listed shortcomings all sound like features that over time should be developed by Twitter. Assuming those features are value adding.

Surely. Right now there are 5 different services one has to use in order to get the stats.

> Might work in the short term but long term the odds of survival are low.

FB page analytics products seem to be doing just fine. One product does not fit all, so if someone has a good product offering, a bunch of people are still going to use it. E.g. Kissmetrics vs Mixpanel, they do the same thing, but appeal different audiences.

> - No sentiment analysis

I doubt Twitter will ever do this mostly because of the scale of the problem and because I don't see why they would release it as a product for free (even if they came up with something solid).

> I don't see why they would release it as a product for free (even if they came up with something solid)

Brand perception is huge thing! Twitter can heavily push brands towards improving the positive sentiment by promoted & recommended campaigns. Giving a Free tool to Tweeps is a great way for lead generation and getting people bought into sponsored tweets, hashtags etc.

They bought Bluefin (biggest acquisition pre-IPO) which did a ton of really great sentiment analysis. They ended up shelving Bluefin's product (which was targets at brands and TV networks), because they'd already signed a deal with Nielsen. A shame too. Bluefin's data was amazing. And they had lots of paying customers.

It could be a very easy add-on play for big users, but Twitter hasn't historically wanted to be in the services business.

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