Twitter Analytics now lets everyone check the popularity of their tweets

For a while now, verified users and advertisers have been able to check statistics about their Twitter account so they can see how many times individual tweets have been viewed, check what types of tweet encourage the most engagement, and so on. Now Twitter Analytics is available to everyone -- free of charge.

It doesn’t matter if you have a blue verified tick next to your name or not, now you can use the analytics dashboard to check the performance of tweets. While this is a useful tool for businesses, for the average Twitter user it is a tool that will satisfy an idle curiosity and provide a way to while away the time obsessing over what key phrases yield the greatest return.

For those with a fascination for figures, the ability to see how many people view individual tweets is a dream come true. It might not be quite as in-depth as you might expect, or hope, but it strikes a good balance between providing useful information and remaining easy to use. Of course, additional data would be great, but it would end up complicating things. There's an eye-pleasing graph that shows at a glance how many hits your tweets have earned you.

Further graphs to the right of the pages give an overview of your account's performance over the past four weeks. The dashboard shows not only how many tweets have been favorited, how many have been replied to, how many have been retweeted, and how many tweeted links have been clicked, but also how this compares to the previous month. If you have time on your hands, you can scroll back through your entire timeline to check the performance of individual posts, but sadly there's no search or filter function. There are also some interesting breakdowns of follower details which could eliminate the need for third party follower tracking tools.

It certainly all makes for interesting reading. From my own stats, it's easy to see that tweets that ask a question, feature an exclamation point, or make reference to the iPhone fare particularly well. You must excuse me... I'm off to obsess over stats for a bit...

Absolutely thrilled to open up access to http://t.co/wcU6oj9hFM to EVERYONE. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

— Ian Chan (@chanian) August 27, 2014