With the rapid growth in the use of Twitter, there’s bound to be a growing interest in tools to analyze Twitter statistics and social graphs, even while on the go. Tweeb is the latest application to do just that, and it’s for the iPhone. Tweeb is developed by D.C.-based Ken Yarmosh and Mobomo.
Mobomo is the developer of a number of iPhone lab applications: TrafficTweet, HexOut, Rings and ExpenseBooks for FreshBooks. Yarmosh is a “product strategist” based in the Washington, D.C., area. In a post about Tweeb, he says upfront that the app isn’t for everyone. One look at it confirms that it’s obviously intended for the slice of heavy Twitter users who are also interested in analyzing a variety of statistics about their usage and social network.
The first thing that struck me about Tweeb — aside from the odd name reminiscent of “dweeb” — is the attractive interface. Though it’s still in pre-beta (V0.9, at the time of this writing), they seem to have put a fair bit of thought into design. That said, the colors of Tweeb’s interface actually reminds me of a competing iPhone app, Birdbrain, which I’ve been using near daily to trim my Twitter network and check on general stats.
Tweeb’s feature set is presented differently than Birdbrain, and despite being in V0.9, seems to have many of the features of Birdbrain, though I haven’t done a feature by feature comparison. Tweeb’s current features include (but are not limited to):
- Support for multiple Twitter accounts. (I only tried with one.)
- Summary page showing # tweets, followers, buzz (mentions), and clicks.
- History page showing an at-a-glance view of the same information by day.
- Summary of lost followers. This only starts to show sometime after you start to use Tweeb.
- Average tweets per day (since creating the account).
- Follower ratio – the #users following you divided by #users you’re following.
- Display of your recent tweets.
- Followers – List of which users are following you. Note: There’s no “following” list. Those users that you are following have a checkmark beside them.
- User info – If you click on a Twitter user in one of your lists, you’ll see their avatar, summary stats, and a recent tweet timeline.
- List of “mentions” and “retweets”.
- Clicks broken down by day.
- Post to Twitter. Tweeb does not have native posting to Twitter. Instead, this feature triggers the iPhone Twitter client that you’ve set as default, but your choices are limited to Tweetie (default on first use of Tweeb), Echofon, Birdfeed, Twitterific and Twinkle. (What, no Tweetdeck?)
I tried most of the features and found them very easy to use. There are no doubt other features I’ve missed, and there are more in development for future versions, but the metric that caught my attention is “Clicks”. This measures the clickthrough count of any links (full URL, not short) that you’ve posted to Twitter. This is great for measuring interaction with your network, to see if they are finding your links tweetworthy. For example, I posted a link on January 21st to an article about Seesmic and got 6321 clicks out of 7754. The info for the Clicks feature explains these values further, but essentially, because of the way these URL shortening services report clicks, this does not mean a link I shared received that many votes. Regardless, it’s an interesting feature.
Here are some screenshots of the app, including the “lost users” feature (which appears on the righthand side of the second-last image): [UPDATE: The "lost users" feature will appear in V1.0. It does not exist at the time of this writing, which is why the screenshot below shows info for @kenyarmosh.)
Overall, I like Tweeb [website, iTunes link], though I should point out that I AM a computer geek and I HAD planned on developing a custom Twitter Analytics app for the iPhone. Still, there is a ton of value for dedicated Twitter users. Tweeb is US$1.99, which is less than competing app Birdbrain’s $2.99, but if you’re serious about accessing your Twitter stats, both are good, attractive apps.
For more information about what your company should be measuring check out our article “The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor“
