If you use Twitter for business purposes then you may often have wanted analytics to get access to information such as which of your tweets have provoked the greatest user engagement. Up until now the only way you could get access to this sort of information was either if you were a big business or by trawling through your tweets and trying to spot patterns within them. All this has now changed as Twitter opens its analytics tool to all users.

The amount of information is not as in depth as that provided to Facebook page admins but at least it does give you some indication as to the success of your Twitter account. Currently you can see a list of your last 500 tweets and as well as the date and time that you posted them you can also see how many people favourite, retweeted and replied to each of them. You can download the data as either a CSV or an XLS file that will then allow you to do some greater number crunching around those statistics if you are so inclined.

This is still early days for the tool but there is data that is displayed on screen that is not downloadable such as the number of followers that you have gained and lost each day and also how many times that links you have shared have been clicked. Personally I would like to be able to see this information when I download the data from Twitter. This all helps to build up a picture of the sort of content that your followers like to see and just as importantly not see.

For example if you gained 100 followers over the course of a month then you would probably be quite happy. However if you knew that you gained 200 followers and lost 100 then your view might change slightly if you also knew that of those 100 followers that you lost 80 of them quit following you on the same day then you could look at what you tweeted that day to see if that had a bearing on the loss of so many followers.

I am sure that over time the analytics package that is offered by Twitter will grow and become more useful. This is a start, a useful and much needed start. Right now I am looking at ways that it I can incorporate it into a reporting tool I have for my clients that gives them a comprehensive breakdown of their Facebook activity.