Twitter Now Shows You Exactly How Many People See Your Tweets - And It's Mesmerizing

Twitter has released its Twitter analytics dashboard to all users, and it's completely awesome. (Here's Twitter's official guide on how it works.)

It's also dead simple to use.

Log in to your Twitter account and go to:

http://analytics.twitter.com/.

A dashboard will then display the "performance" of all your recent tweets.

There is a sense on Twitter that because your Home timeline feed is moving so fast, a tweet has a "life" of just a few minutes and hardly anyone sees them unless you're lucky enough to get retweeted by a very famous person.

Sometimes, tweeting is like gazing into the abyss, as Nietzsche might have said. With Twitter Analytics, you can now find out whether the abyss is retweeting you.

Here's a look at my dashboard.

About 232,000 people saw my tweets in the last four weeks - not bad!

This tweet was one of my biggest hits:

The tweet featured a link to a story about a young man who had been banned from Google's AdSense program. About 8,000 people saw it, 162 "engaged" with it (by retweeting or favoriting) giving me an engagement rate of 2%. Two percent is actually pretty high for engagement on Twitter, it turns out.

Here's a tweet that wasn't so successful:

People don't like archly knowing references to unicorns in tweets about adtech companies like AppNexus who raise new investment funding, it seems. It had precisely zero percent engagement from my 6,000 followers.

If you really want a high level of engagement on Twitter - nearly 4% in this case - here is what you have to do.

Make fun of Americans who don't know who Kate Bush is:

That tweet was a reference to this story about people videoing the "Wuthering Heights" singer at her first concert in 35 years, and the fact that my younger American colleagues have no clue who Bush is.

The point here, of course, is not that making fun of Americans who don't who Kate Bush is the way to go on Twitter. Really, it's about finding out the real reasons that your followers find you interesting, and how that compares to your own perception of yourself.

And that is why Twitter Analytics is so compelling: It's like seeing yourself in a brutal social media vanity mirror. Sometimes hideous, sometimes not so bad ... but you cannot look away.

Disclosure: The author owns Twitter stock.