Twitter is releasing a real time analytics solution in Q4

At the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit yesterday, Ross Hoffman shared with the crowd that sports leagues, teams, and players will have access to a real time analytics dashboard from Twitter. I had the opportunity to ask Ross a few questions after his panel, and here’s what I learned:

• Twitter is planning to release a real time analytics dashboard in Q4. Like their releases of ads and the new UI, this will likely start as a beta release and have a phased roll out. Because the conference was a sports marketing conference, Ross said it would be available to that audience, but presumably it will be available to all users.
• The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more. The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics.
• It is being created by the team Twitter acquired in June, which created Trendly.
• The product will be free.

This is a big announcement from Twitter as analytics is critical to not only justifying marketing budget (something Twitter marketers have struggled to prove), but also to improve marketing efforts. It appears that Twitter’s focus is on providing data about stream activity, as compared to account health, such as the metrics from Klout, Twitalyzer, and others.

It’s unclear as to whether or not this data will be made available via an API as Facebook has done, but given Twitter’s strong use of APIs in their product history it would surprise us if they didn’t offer the data as an API.