Twitter isn’t the only one to blame on this. There isn’t a social network which (in my opinion) would deserve a nomination for “complete and understandable statistics”. For twitter, there are three numbers I would like to see.
Sources of new followers
A lot of things would be more clear to a lot of marketers i they knew where their followers came from. For example- tweet box on company’s blog, follow button, pop-up window after tweeting company’s blog post, link from external source to twitter profile etc. Right now it’s hard to determine what impact other activities have on twitter follower numbers.
How many followers have loaded my tweet
There are various estimates about how many people there are on twitter, how many of them just read or how many actually have already abandoned the service long ago. Facebook has number “xxxxx people saw this post” which gives at least some insight on how many people notice brand’s messages. Twitter should do the same and offer insights on how many people have accessed (at least technically downloaded) any given tweet via web, mobile or API requests.
Number of clicks on links
It’s cool that twitter shorten links posted on their service. But it was much cooler if they also gave numbers on these clicks. I know, that other link shorteners offer this and there are plenty of workarounds for this, but still. It would just make everyone’s life easier.
BTW, I would be happy to pay for such stats.
