This past week, Twitter made its analytics dashboard available to all 271 million of its users. Before Wednesday, the analytics tool was only available to advertisers (the companies that promote the Tweets that randomly show up on your timeline), but now everyone can see the true impact of their tweets. Many public figures and celebrities have verified Twitter accounts already, but this new tool is more advertising friendly, so many more media and news outlets would be able to gain valuable insight into their consumer reach.

Before this tool was available, the only way to get a sense of how many people you were reaching was from the number of favorites, retweets, or replies you got on a Tweet, which isn’t the most accurate. With the new dashboard, you are able to know how many people actually see your tweet as well as engage with it. More specifically, the new dashboard has three components:

• Tweet Activity: This measures the amount of engagement your tweets get and offers tips and advice on how to make Tweets more successful
• Followers: This gives insight on the location and demographics of your followers or those who engage with your Tweets
• Twitter Cards: This tool’s biggest factor is that it allows you to get more from the 140 allotted characters by allowing you to represent content within Tweets across the Web and on mobile devices. This is an interesting development and you can learn more about it here

Although Twitter definitely made a smart move with its analytics, it still is behind Facebook and Pinterest. These two other social media sites launched their analytics tools a while back so Twitter is still playing catch-up, to a sense. It will be interesting to see how advertisers and media outlets will use the Twitter analytics tool in combination with those of Facebook and Pinterest to get the most out of their social media channels.