Twitter’s New “Engage” App Will Help Out the Rich and Famous? Oh, Great
Twitter’s new Engage app launched today, and although it’s available to everybody, it’s clearly designed with social media managers in mind. Or, better yet, “influencers.” What is an “influencer”? I’m not sure, but based on my observations inside the Engage app, it seems to mean that you have at least a couple thousand followers on Twitter.
The Engage app bears some similarity to Twitter’s built-in analytics tool, which can be found at analytics.twitter.com. Twitter Analytics will show you basic information about your most popular tweets, your most “influential” followers, and the “engagement” that each of your successful posts has received (e.g. likes, retweets, mentions, replies). It’s the type of website that you’d go to if you were running a company or if you were a celebrity’s publicist or if you just really, really care about how many people see your tweets.
The same types of people might enjoy the new Engage app, which is for smartphones and could be used to replace the ordinary Twitter app, since you can use it to write tweets and see all of your mentions and so on. However, it has some benefits over the core Twitter app, since there’s a new section where you can look at recent analytics (the “Understand” tab on the bottom of the screen, as pictured above, will take you to your analytics). If you wanted to look at your analytics on the go, the Engage app is a good way to do it, but if you’re sitting at a desktop, then you may as well just go to the ordinary Twitter Analytics website. It’s basically the same info in both places.
The other dubious benefit of the Engage app is that when you’re looking at your mentions, you now have the option to only see mentions from “Verified” users. When I do this, I see almost no one. I am not Verified myself, and I do not know very many people who are Verified, either. It was kind of silly to see which of my four friends do happen to have those blue check marks; it didn’t really make my mentions better, it only reminded me that some of my friends have gotten Twitter’s inexplicable seal of approval, but many of my friends haven’t. So, the “Verified” filter doesn’t really help me out at all, but I imagine if you’re a celebrity and you only want to talk to other celebrities, that tool could be useful.
Then again, if you are a Verified user on Twitter, then you already have access to their “quality filter” that allows you to spruce up your mentions. Too bad they won’t let the rest of us peasants have that, hm?
Anyway, I’m glad that Twitter made it possible for me to use Engage rather than locking me out of it, although it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t “for” me. If you’re starting a corporate account on Twitter and you want to be able to track the results, then this seems like a helpful app to install. But for the rest of us who just want Twitter to be a friendlier place? Guess we’ll have to keep on waiting.
(via The Daily Dot, image via Twitter)
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