Handy tool shows you where your Twitter followers are from
A new Twitter tool has just launched, that allows you to track where the majority of your Twitter followers are from. Twocation tracks the top countries your Twitter followers are based and though it may seem like just a quirky tool to use and tweet about, it actually provides an incredibly useful piece of insight to brands and individuals, which is currently lacking within Twitter. The site is very easy to use. You simply connect through your Twitter account to be given a percentage breakdown of your followers by location, with the top 3 locations presented as a summary, as well as scrolling down to a full country breakdown in full. And thankfully, the site doesn’t auto-tweet for you, but does provide you with an editable tweet to share the site with your followers.
The site was developed by David Barker and what I believe Barker has done is highlight a huge gap in Twitter’s current offering and the lack of analytics that they provide to users. Twocation is useful particularly for larger brands who may gather large followings on Twitter, but without really knowing if they’re attracting and speaking to the right people. Location is something that Twitter have kind of dabbled in themselves, but with services like adding location to your tweets not really taking off or working to its full potential that it could.
Why do other people do Twitter better?
When Twitter decided earlier in the year that they were very much cutting off their relationships with developers and removing API support for apps they deemed against their terms of use, not only did they piss a lot of people off, but they also made a pretty big statement that they felt they could offer their users much more than other developers could. As twocation shows however, this isn’t necessarily the case. Consistently, developers (often working with no monetisation route) provide us with little tools and plugins for Twitter that improve the service and give us the kind of thing they really need. For some reason with Twitter in particular, ,this has consistently been the case and it shows the huge risk they took by distancing themselves from developers.
This is impacting Twitter’s long term value in a very real way. It seems that since they decided they could do things better themselves, their native functionality has been going down in quality and effectiveness. Twitter’s own search function has been incredibly shaky lately, seemingly missing many results. I often find more results coming in through Tweetdeck than are detected within Twitter search. And this is again something not developed by Twitter, as they acquired the search engine summize.com 2008 to be their official search tool, before discontinuing the service as it existed at search.twitter.com completely. Twitter are playing a risky game here. The more they work against developers (and this is by no means their total approach), the more they risk halting development of useful apps like this.
The need for analytics
One thing Twitter needs to get right (and quickly) is the analytics offered to all users, whether larger accounts, verified, brands or individuals. This is something that Facebook has got right very early on and what it means is that brands focus more time, money and energy on the site, as they’re able to track their activities effectively to see what is/isn’t working and adapting the strategy accordingly. With Twitter, the information provided on your own account is minimal. The level of tweets a service like Twocation is getting from high profile tweeters, shows the clear need for this. For brands, this tool will be absolutely invaluable to their use of Twitter and it will hopefully contribute to Twitter consolidating this into a full, free analytics package for users.
