EQUTE — Twitter said it will soon offer big brands premium accounts that include enhanced features and analytics tools.

The announcement comes after many big brands jumped to be a part of Twitter analytics services and other news that Fortune 100 companies really didn’t use Twitter much.

A Weber Shandwick study shows that Fortune 100 companies are lagging far behind 15-year-old girls when it comes to Twitter.

The Weber Shandwick study showed that 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts. However, about three-quarters (76 percent) of those accounts did not post tweets very often, and more than half (52 percent) were not actively engaged.(This was measured by engagement metrics such as numbers of links, hashtags, references and retweets.)

In addition, 50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers, a small number in relation to the size and reach of a major corporation. Another 15 percent were inactive; of those, 11 percent were merely placeholder accounts — unused accounts to protect corporate names against so-called brand-jacking on Twitter — and 4 percent were abandoned after being used for a specific event.

In response, Biz Stone said that the site would charge for the new premium accounts.

“We want to present to [businesses] a layer of features to help make them better at Twitter, and share some of the analytics,” he said.

EQUTE — Tracking in the Twitterverse is a little bit of a chore for most people. But a new Twitter analytics service is drawing some really, really big names, suggesting that internal analytics work is far off.

CoTweet promises many things:

The program includes:

Reach analytics — visibility into the true reach of Twitter messages and click thru rates on embedded links

Engagement analytics — reports on inbound and outbound message types (DM, @replies, @mentions), response rates and times, most active users

Influence analytics — measures the social media influence of brands and users, including those most influential in specific industries and topics; provided through partnership with Klout.

Extended customer conversation history — a lifetime archive of customer interactions

Priority updates — faster access to Twitter updates

Dedicated account management — a single point of contact providing account analysis and priority product support and training

The $1,500 a month service is only open to “select group of innovative companies,” so Twitter tracking for the masses will continue to be a hassle, but CoTweet is a good step toward making sense and making money off Twitter with real demonstrable results.

The ad network Chitka did some research and found that more than anything, Twitter users want news.

A total of 28 percent of links leaving Twitter went to news stories.

So what can advertisers learn from this? Don’t just send out deals or coupons, make some announcements, tell your Twitter followers about something new and interesting you’re doing. They might repay the favor with a re-tweet and thus you’ve gone viral — at least a little bit — on Twitter.