Twitter Analytics - quite fun

Edit: 29 March 2014 - I'm not sure if the number of clicks reflects people clicking on it from my tweet or just the total (across all of Twitter) number of clicks regardless of who's shared the link. I had a look at my analytics yesterday and saw that a link I'd tweeted a few days ago was now up at 200+ clicks but that increase can't have come from my tweet which is now buried further down my timeline.

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Yesterday I discovered that Twitter Analytics exist and are free, and a bit fascinating.

To play along, be logged into Twitter then go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ - you can see how often people have clicked on links and there's a record of the number of favourites, retweets and replies.

When I had a look through I spotted that a link I'd posted a few days ago to a concert in July I'm bonkersly excited about (David Arnold: live in concert = film music!) had been clicked 30 times. I've sinced tweeted it again and it's now gone up to 72 thanks to more retweets.

I've actually tweeted the link a few times since Feburary and would have expected each tweet to have a different number by it, depending on how many clicks it gets for a particular tweet, eg 15 click for the first tweet, another 10 for the second, 20 for the third and so on - but each of them now displays '72 clicks' - so the number of clicks for any given tweet isn't available, as you can see below.

Click to embiggen any of the pictures to see them a bit more clearly

The pic above doesn't mean that the link was clicked 72 times for both tweets (144 clicks) but 72 overall.

It's entirely possible that no-one clicked the link from this tweet as I wasn't actually 'sharing a link' as such, more asking possibly-nerdier followers to see if they knew what the glitch was (since fixed).

I'd have thought the more honest, and truthful, thing would be for the number of clicks to reflect how many came from a particular tweet as it would seem that that would be more useful (eg telling you that more people click through at 10am on Monday morning than they do at 10am on Thursday morning or whatever).

Still, it's quite fun.

Apparently Twitter is also telling some users (using the iOS Twitter app) how many people have viewed their tweet too (hat tip @simonhowes).