Twitter to reportedly start beta testing an analytics dashboard by year end

WebTrends is reporting that Twitter will start beta testing a free-t0-use analytics dashboard with a limited number of users by the end of the year.

According to WebTrends, Ross Hoffman of Twitter leaked out the company’s plans yesterday at conference in San Francisco, and these are the details:

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.

The news that the dashboard will be free is a little surprising on the face of it, especially if it extends beyond accounts of individuals and into corporate accounts, but Twitter does seem locked into its advertising model, and as Google has clearly showed, offering free analytics is a great way to tie in how you spend advertising dollars on any media site.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to absolutely confirm this, but the report seems pretty solid. We’ll certainly keep an eye out for this sometime later in the year.

UPDATE: Twitter PR just got back to us and had this to say – take it as you will:

“We’ve been talking about providing analytics since last December, but have nothing to add at this time.”