Twitter Toys With Ways To Boost Engagement With ‘@AchievementBird’ Experiment

Twitter has begun experimenting with an account, called @AchievementBird, that will direct message you ‘achievements’ that you earn with your tweets. The account is protected but has granted follows in the past few days.

Once you’re on the list, the account will occasionally send you messages about how one of your tweets has performed. Xero engineer Owen Williams noted the account on Twitter, as well as a couple of the messages that he had received so far:

One of my tweets was ‘used in an article’ and AchievementBird notified me of the fact. When I clicked on the link, the relatively new ‘Related headlines’ feature showed me exactly where the tweet had been used.

Another Twitter experimental account called @magicheadlines is likely related to this effort, as it claims to let you ‘See where tweets are embedded around the web’ — though it could have some wider applications as a digest of newsworthy tweets.

When asked for comment, Twitter referred us to the blog post on its continuing experimentation efforts.

It appears that AchievementBird is tapping into Twitter’s analytics package to surface the results of user tweets. Though it rolled out analytics to business users and verified users first, anyone can now get access to the page using their ‘ads’ dashboard.

This is what it looks like:

If you’re a frequent tweeter, you’ll have some stats stacked up about RTs, favorites, followers and more. I’ve talked before about how Twitter is experimenting with an account called @magicstats, which appears to measure the popularity of tweets by velocity. In that piece I mentioned that third-party Twitter engagement tracker Favstar is one of my go-to sites on a daily basis.

One of the features that Favstar offers is accounts that hit you up when your tweets have passed fav milestones like ’50′ or ’100′. It also offers a ‘tweet of the day’ award that you can bestow on friends or follows you think gave good tweet.

Who knows what Twitter will end up doing with the AchievementBird account in the end, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it weave it into the main product as it did with the MagicRecs account. Having full access to Twitter’s dataset means that Twitter can offer features Favstar can’t, as it has to poll the API.

I still like Favstar’s presentation better, and its integration with third-party apps, but it’s early days for AchievementBird and Twitter could always revamp its analytics to be more friendly. Either way, this appears to be rolling along the track towards integration as a push notification, not a landing page.

Sending alerts to users notifying them that people are actually reading and even using their tweets in articles seems to be a good way to encourage those users to tweet more. And converting users from lurkers to active tweeters is important for retention and growth.

Image Credit: Jerine Lay