Tuesday it came out that Pierre Omidyar is working on a new Twitter-based startup that uses url analytics data to make recommendations and extend twitter conversations around the web. It seems like an interesting idea, but more importantly, it’s yet another example of why Twitter is missing a huge opportunity in analytics.
Much of Twitter’s success lies on the notion that anyone can build an audience on Twitter, and if desired, parlay that audience into traffic and attention elsewhere on the web.
The problem is, it’s hard to actually track these results. And until you can, businesses by and large won’t invest serious resources into the platform.
While there are services that are starting to address the analytics problem (brightkit’s url analytics feature is one of the best out there), because none are integrated with Twitter, significant value is being left on the table.
Imagine posting a link on Twitter and not only seeing how many people clicked on it, from where and when, but knowing in aggregate who else those users follow, and what other Twitter streams those readers most actively clicked links from. This would be invaluable information to individuals and companies alike.
And follower analytics are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine being able to enter your site into a twitter dashboard, and tracking which users are most actively posting links to your content, and which are most actively referring users to your site (getting click throughs). Because users read Twitter from so many distinct sites and platforms, it’s impossible to track this type of stuff without building it into Twitter itself.
The point is there is enormous power in tracking analytics on urls on Twitter, and it’s something Twitter could instantly do by simply auto-wrapping urls (disable by preference) in a Twitter shortener (like they do with tinyurl right now).
Of course, since the service could provide significant marketing and ROI value to businesses and publishers, all of this could be available for a paid subscription fee. Whether Twitter decided to offer this at a low fixed monthly price, or decided to make it a high priced, ultra premium service for medium and large sized companies, there is no doubt revenue potential from these capabilities.
At the end of the day Twitter is an information and marketing platform. Without an analytics tool, the company is simply leaving money on the table for both themselves and their users.
Feedback? Write a comment, or e-mail the author at lee(AT)squawkingbaseball.com
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