Twitter announced this week it was making a set of analytics tools available for website and blog owners to help them measure just how much traffic Twitter is driving to their websites.

According to an article on Mashable, the new analytics feature is based on Backtype, the social analytics company that Twitter bought in July. Christopher Goda who was founder of Backtype outlined the new analytics feature in a Twitter blog post.

Goda explained that the new analytics let users measure Twitter traffic in three ways. First, you can understand how people are sharing your content on Twitter. Second, you can see how much pure traffic you are getting from Twitter (something I've been curious about on my own sites), and finally you can see how much your Twitter button is being used. The Twitter button lets your users share directly from your site and typically gives you a number of Tweets on the button face itself, so that particular metric isn't that useful.

But the other two features could be very useful in understanding how much influence your company's content has on Twitter and how much people are sharing it. These could be very handy metrics for content producers and take some of the guess work out of Twitter use.

It's all well and good for social media experts to say you should be on Twitter, but these tools could provide some serious data to measure your Twitter traffic over time.

The analytics tools are only available for a group of select Beta testers for the time being, but should be widely available shortly.

For more information:
- see the Twitter blog post

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