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Wanna See Who Actually Reads Your Tweets?

by Lauren Barbato

If you're looking for an ego boost, look no further: There's an easy way to see just how many people witness your Twitter brilliance each day. Twitter has officially rolled out the Twitter Analytics platform, a "Tweet activity dashboard" that's updated in real time. It's definitely a much simpler way to keep track of who loves/despises your Tweets than endlessly scrolling through your mentions.

According to Mashable, Twitter first tested out its new analytics platform on its advertisers, marketers and verified users earlier this summer. Thanks to its success, Twitter Analytics is now available to all Twitter users whose accounts are at least 14 days old and viewable to the public (sorry, protected accounts). You also have to Tweet primarily in English, French, Spanish or Japanese.

Here's how Twitter Analytics works: The platform is synced up with your Twitter feed, showing your tweets in reverse-chronological order. The analytics system starts off by tallying the "impressions" for each tweet — meaning, the number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter.

Then, the analytics system tracks the number of "engagements" for every tweet, which includes everything from retweets and replies to link or profile clicks. Finally, the platform calculates each tweet's engagement rate, which then factors into your accounts overall engagement rate.

If this sounds complicated, don't worry — the Twitter Analytics dashboard is clean and organized (and color coded!) for us non-web savvy folks. Although the platform analyzes the engagement rate over your feed's last 28 days, Twitter Analytics has stats on every tweet you ever made, so you can definitely scroll through months or years worth of tweets to see which ones performed the best.

There's also a "followers" page, where users can see the breakdown of their followers: gender, shared interests and geographical locations. You can also see how many of your Twitter friends follow Barack Obama.

Twitter hasn't explicitly said why it's rolled out Twitter Analytics, or what it plans to do with these all-encompassing statistics. However, it is a nifty way for regular ol' users to track their social media engagement, and could potentially help users who are trying to expand their Twitter reach perfect their social media strategy. The platform also helps out a ton of businesses and organizations, which typically have to used outside analytics services to track their social media numbers.

So what did I learn from my Twitter Analytics experience? People love Barack Obama, political news and jokes about The Big Bang Theory.

Images: fifeflyingfife/Fotolia; Twitter Analytics