Twitter has launched a new way of managing a business account by scheduling Tweets, seeing what people are saying about you and viewing your analytics.
The Twitter Dashboard is available at https://dashboard.twitter.com/. There is also a iOS app – but that is only available in the US at the moment.
As regular readers of my blog know, I am a big HootSuite fan, so will the Twitter dashboard take the place of HootSuite? Let’s explore it in more detail.
The Twitter Dashboard shows four options on the top left – which offer some interesting insight into your activity.
Home
Offers 4 additional options
About You
This can be used to show tweets that mention you or any related keywords, twitter accounts or hashtags. You can also exclude words or phrases you don’t want to include.
Your Tweets
Shows all the tweets you have published.
Timeline
Shows all tweets from all the accounts you are following.
Messages
Shows any direct messages you have.
Create
Allows you to create a tweet and gives the option to schedule it in the future.
Profile
Allows you to select tweets to be displayed in a featured section.
Featured sections are optional – when turned on, your Twitter profile will have an additional ‘Featured’ Tab. This will show latest tweets, a gallery of images and featured tweets. Have a look at our Concise Training profile to see this in action.
Analytics
Displays a number of sections for the last week, 30 days or 60 days
Activity
Displays number of tweets, the number of tweets with a photo, video and GIF and number of replies you have received.
Audience
Shows the number of times you have been mentioned and any new followers in the timeframe.
Visits and views
Shows profile visits in the time frame as well as tweet impressions.
Our Opinion
Some of these features I really like. The create option finally allows scheduling within Twitter – but HootSuite offers better functionality particularly in terms of the automatic scheduling and bulk upload (for those on the Pro option).
The Analytics section is useful. It is good to be able to easily identify metrics for a week like mentions and replies and to see who has followed in the past week. I would like to see who has unfollowed too – but I guess this would be a bit negative for Twitter to display. 😃
Tweet impressions and visits are also good metrics, but more information is given in the full analytics available at https://analytics.twitter.com (including top tweets) so I’m not sure why you would use the dashboard analytics.
The featured section is very interesting and allows more control over what people see when they look at your profile – it will be important to make sure you keep this recent, though.
However, overall, I don’t see us giving up HootSuite anytime soon. It offers better engagement, listening and scheduling features. We would be interested to know what you think, though – let us know in the comments.