Just like everyone working to build a business based on Twitter, we at Twitalyzer have always been somewhat circumspect about the relationship we have with “the source.” Twitter’s leadership has always been kind of vague about which direction they would take the business, especially when asked about making money. Our hesitation has ebbed and flowed over the past year — increasing when @biz said that they would be doing analytics, decreasing when we saw their “Enterprise” dashboards, increasing when they started changing their terms of service, decreasing after Chirp when we thought we understood their strategy, etc.
June 10th was another roller-coaster ride given Twitter’s acquisition of Dabble DB, makers of the Google Analytics tchotchke Trendly.
At first Jeff and I were bummed; just like all the folks developing Twitter apps for iPhone, anyone building an advertising solution, the Co-Tweets and Hootsuites of the world working to build business-management solutions on the platform, we kind of felt like we’d done a bunch of work to make Twitter more valuable only to have the rug pulled out from under us.
But we thought about it for a little bit and remembered that Twitter never made us any promises. We knew full well when we started investing time and energy into Twitalyzer that Twitter could invest in analytics like this at any time, at least when we were being honest with ourselves.
More importantly, we can’t succeed with Twitalyzer unless Twitter succeeds as a platform. While we love Twitter and all the great things the platform powers, we are also practical enough to realize that unless they figure out a way to become a real business that all our work could be for naught. And despite the amazing work their developers have done over the past year, this weeks API outage emphasizes that Twitter is still very much a work in progress. If Ev and Biz believe advertising and analytics are their path to stability and profitability, well, who are we to complain?
Finally, we love that Twitter thinks that analytics on the platform is important enough to make this acquisition! Sure, we wish they would have bought us or our friends at Klout, but we’re happy for Dabble and we are absolutely excited to know that Twitter will be doing our marketing for us, emphasizing the need for analytics against the platform and the value of measuring success in Twitter-based marketing and customer relationship management.
Given all of this, I personally wanted to reiterate our commitment to our users and customers:
- Twitalyzer will provide highest-quality measurement and reporting on Twitter for as long as we are able. Unless Twitter changes their terms of use (again) and forces us out of business, we will continue to develop against the platform and provide the same or better services we have for the past year;
- Twitalyzer’s customers will continue to be our number one commitment. When we decided to take people’s money, we knew we were “all in” on Twitalyzer and nothing about Twitter buying Dabble DB changes that. “Money changes everything” they say, but we are going to work tirelessly to make sure that money changes everything for the better;
- Our payment model will stay the same, and customers will always be able to cancel anytime for any reason. We’re optimists, but we’re also realists. If Twitter comes out with an analytics package significantly better than Twitalyzer we would expect customers to want to switch and won’t get in the way.
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We are self-funded, profitable, and not beholden to anyone except ourselves and our customers. This great luxury allows us to continue to innovate and do what we believe is best for our customers, our business, and our friends. Not everyone has this luxury — certainly not Twitter — so we are going to make the most of our opportunity regardless of how the ecosystem around us evolves.
I welcome any questions you have about this post, our business, or the Twitalyzer service. Email me at eric at twitalyzer dot com, tweet to me at @erictpeterson, or give me a call at (503) 282-2601.
Sincerely,
Eric T. Peterson
CEO and Founder
Twitalyzer, LLC
We are extremely excited to be releasing this version of Twitalyzer which greatly enhances our services with expanded capabilities for businesses and agencies. You, our loyal users, have told us what you want and need to help gain further insights into your Twitter usage - You want more control of your data and you want to get at it more efficiently. We have made considerable strides in achieving those goals and we believe you will find this latest version of Twitalyzer even better!
In addition to continuing to offer the most robust twitter analytics service for free, Twitalyzer now provides several advanced features with three cost-effective subscription options.
Advanced Subscription Options
While Twitalyzer continues to offer the most robust Twitter Analytics solution for free, we now provide many new advanced features for businesses & agencies with three cost-effective subscription options.
- Automatic daily updates: Ensures that your account is processed twice a day.
- Multiple account tracking: Associate multiple authenticated Twitter accounts with your primary account and then move seamlessly between accounts for easy access and comparisons.
- Competitive analysis: Our Agency subscription allows you to track the complete set of Twitalyzer metrics for any account in Twitter Keep track of your clients’ accounts or competition, monitor the Twitter “elite”, or research potential customers
- Complete data export: Full access to all of the information collected & stored for an account
- Custom date ranges: Generate monthly, quarterly, annual, or campaign-specific views across all the metrics.
- Weekly Reports: For Business and Agency subscriptions, a weekly email summary of the previous two weeks activity. Week-over-week changes for key Twitalyzer data, top Network, and top Retweeters to make sure you stay up to date on all of your accounts. You can also send this report to others in your department or even a business partner.
User Interface Updates
- “Less is more” approach towards data
- Summary view popup for all users
- Switch user profile without losing context
- Added functionality to processing engine; now gathering Twitter “retweets” for inclusion in all metrics
New & Enhanced Reports
- Profile. Less is more! View your Impact Score, Influencer Type and Location as well as your current Network
- Metrics: The Metric reports shows the 20 metrics and measures in one place. Newly added metrics are Retweeted per 1k followers, Retweet Ratio, References per 1k followers, Reference Ratio and Klout Score
- Tweet Tracking: See how far any tweet reached by potential Impressions and overall Tweet Impact.
- Comparison: Visualize side-by-side comparison of Twitalyzer’s key metrics of two users.
- Personality: Leveraging our partner TweetPsych’s social and psychological data, compare your Twitter psychological profile with any Twitter user.
- Lists: Create Lists in Twitalyzer and Twitter and see how the recent scores and activity for all of the users on your various lists compare.
- Influencer Types: A categorization we derive from work done by Forrester Research. The three types we track include:
- Sources are individuals with smaller networks who are often originating ideas in Twitter
- Spiders are individuals with mid-sized networks who are socially connected
- Suns are individuals with large to very large networks of first-level connections
- Activity By Day: Formerly known as the Trends reports, this report displays average values of the metrics based on the selected timeframe. Business and Agency subscription users can also create and export data in custom date ranges.
- Last Seven Days: A great visual snapshot to how active you were in the past 7 days including updates, mentions and retweets.
Activity by Hour: Another great visual snapshot of when what hours of the day you were most active including updates, mentions and retweets. - Activity by Hour: Another great visual snapshot of when what hours of the day you were most active including updates, mentions and retweets.
If you have any questions or comments, check out our help page for FAQs, metric definitions and contact information
In addition to the recent updates that Jeff posted I wanted to share two really cool changes we made this week:
1) Twitalyzer updates are now available in REAL-TIME for those of you who just can’t Twitalyze enough. Instead of having to wait 24 hours to update your scores, you can now get updated scores every hour. And while we recognize that a one-hour delay is not “real-timey” enough for some folks, our intention is to reduce that delay as much as possible based on server performance.
2) Everyone, and this means you, is now getting access to Twitalyzer PRO features! This includes all the tagging and visualization features as well as the “Top 100 Influencers” list. You folks have been so awesome we wanted to do something nice so welcome to the “PRO” club!
You may need to update your profile to see the new “PRO” features appear. If you can’t find them go ahead and Twitter Jeff or Eric and we’ll make it happen ASAP.
And, if you’re psyched about all the changes we’ve been making lately, won’t you please help us out and Twitter about your love for Twitalyzer?
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