Any good website owner will have analytics attached to it. These analytics will give them vital information about the people who visit that website. It tells you how long they spent at your site and how many pages they looked at, along with 100’s of other things.

With so much communication moving away from just websites, to now incorporating stuff like facebook and twitter, the challenge has appeared as to how to analyse data from these services. You need good data so that you can make good decisions about how you or your organisation use that service etc. This is where a handy app called TwitSprout enters the scene.

But first a story.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted a tweet from a friend which was advertising the beta test of a new twitter service. I’m normally dubious of advertising on social media, but the tweet read; I’m one of the first in line for the “One Page Twitter Dashboard” from #TwitSprout. Join me bit.ly/JoinBeta via @TwitSprout.

I was immediately hooked, firstly I could be one of the first people in the world to test out a new twitter service, and with a name like twitsprout, how could I refuse?

I clicked the link, quickly put my details into their webpage. I was kindly told that it would take a little while for my stats to grow, but that they would be watered and looked after by the team at TwitSprout. Nice!

I hadn’t really thought that much about it until this morning, when I received an email saying that, “your seeds have finally sprouted!”. My twitter stats were ready.

I clicked the link, and I was presented with an awesome page of analytics for my twitter account. I realised that I tweet the most on Thursdays, and the least on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. After seeing this, It completely made sense, Tuesday and Wednesdays are my two busiest days of the week, with Thursdays being alot less busy. It also gave me a neat graph of my followers and people I am following. It’s a really neatly laid out page, with heaps of useful info.

Then a little box popped out of the bottom of the webpage. It was a guy called Dan. Dan is the CEO of TwitSprout. Dan was offering me help in understanding the data that I had just been presented with, an awesome thing, because not everyone knows alot about reading graphs. Even though these graphs are super easy to understand.

Dan was also asking my opinion about things that I would like to see added to TwitSprout in the future. I said it would be cool to have some stats on re-tweets, and he thought it was also an excellent idea.

To sum up, today ive been shocked by 2 things.

1. That someone has actually made a really good, accessible and understandable twitter analytics application.
2. That the CEO of this (little) company has made the time and invested the effort to not only speak to his users individually about what they would like to see in the future, but to walk them through their own stats. Both rare, and helpful.

If you are on twitter. Sign up for the beta here.
If you are not on twitter. Get on twitter and then sign up for the beta here.