Tweetmeme Adds Analytics To Make Sense Of Twitter Links

As Twitter grows, with an estimated 50 million+ live accounts, it is increasingly becoming an important source of traffic for many Websites. But getting a handle on how much traffic it is actually delivering, where it is coming from, and the viral nature of that traffic is a real challenge. Today, “social media experts” everywhere can rejoice because Tweetmeme is launching Tweetmeme Analytics, which offers a full dashboard showing how many times a link has been tweeted, retweeted, and clicked on by which Twitter users, in what cities, and from which referring sites and URL shorteners.

Tweetmeme already tracks a lot of this data for the most retweeted links, which is what it uses to determine the hottest stories on Twitter. It also gets a lot of data from its retweet buttons, which are popular on blogs like ours (see above, and click it!).

The Analytics service will be part of a new My Tweetmeme tab on the main site. (In the future, users will be able to create their own channels on Tweetmeme on this tab as well). When you click on Analytics, you enter the Website URL you want to analyze. It then shows the most recent posts or articles for that site. You have to pick a link to build a report around it, which takes a few minutes, but the reports are kind of useless unless they contain the most up to the minute data. Still, if you want to create a lot of reports, you have to schedule them, which is a bit of a drawback.

Once the report is created, you can dive down into data about tweets, retweets, clicks, domians, users, and locations. I’ve created a few reports for TechCrunch links and the charts are a real real eye-opener because no matter what the link, there is always a spike and then it trails off real fast. If you want to keep something alive on Twitter, you have to keep tweeting it out repeatedly. Of course, that will annoy your followers and you may lose them.

So maybe you might want to target your most influential followers instead, which Tweetmeme helps you figure out as well. For every link, it lists the most influential users who posted the link, along with the number of resulting retweets from that user. You can even drill down to see each user’s retweet tree.

Social media experts are going to love this because it will give them something to do and maybe charge their clients extra for, which is why Tweetmeme is charging for access to the Analytics. After a one-month free trial, Analytics will cost $50 per month per domain or $500 per month for an unlimited number of domains. Thus, Tweetmeme joins startups like bit.ly in the belief that there is money to be made in all of this Twitter data.