Twitter Debuts 'Follower Dashboard,' Opens Geotargeting Spigot

Twitter has rolled out a dashboard that lets marketers access data about their followers. It shows how a brand’s followers have increased over time, breaks down their gender and location, displays what interests they have shown, illustrates how engaged they are, and details what kinds of Twitter users they follow.

Speaking at the Ad Age Digital conference today, Twitter director of revenue Adam Bain announced the tool, dubbed the “Follower Dashboard.” ClickZ missed his remarks but followed up with Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves to get additional information.

Graves noted marketers can assess their followers’ locations by country, state, and in some cases, metropolitan areas.

“In terms of the engagement piece,” he said, “we are starting with retweets. So you can see what percentage of your followers have retweeted you.”

Among the available metrics are whether more male or female followers are retweeting a brand (e.g., 45 percent males vs. 55 percent females) and what percentage of followers in individual states such as California or Illinois are retweeting a company’s messages. “This helps you better understand what your Twitter reach means and who these people are that you have reached,” said Graves.

He called the dashboard “a starting point.” Future data points could include the percentage of followers who have “favorited” a brand’s tweets, have replied to a tweet, have clicked on a brand’s assets or its ads, and other engagement factors.

Twitter is slowly rolling out more marketer-friendly features. Before today, the most recent example was geotargeting for the Promoted Tweets and Promoted Products platforms.

Graves said that while only select brands like McDonald’s have beta tested geotargeting in the last two weeks, now any of Twitter’s 600 advertisers can leverage the ability. “It’s only for advertisers; it’s not open to everybody,” he clarified. “They can target campaigns by more than 120 countries. And within the U.S. for Promoted Tweets, they can target by more than 200 specific metropolitan areas.”