After tech companies spent the better part of a week insisting they didn’t simply give away access to user data, Twitter announced it is simply giving away access to user data:
The Timeline activity displays a graph for the user based on the number of mentions, follows and unfollows that they’ve received over the last month. A detailed list underneath shows all of the user’s most recent tweets, including the number of times someone has favorited, retweeted or replied to it.
Sure, this may be depressing as a lot of supposedly clever people find out that no one cares what they say on Twitter. But by showing this new layer of performance, Twitter can make its advertising products (like promoted tweets) more valuable, and draw in money from the social marketing industry. Thanks to the ad platform being opened universally in April, boutique social media firms and freelancers can spend small budgets with Twitter and have measurable results that go beyond follower counts and retweets - and a lot of small budgets can add up quickly.
