Through a SiteCatalyst API, Omniture is launching a tool that enables marketers to measure brand activity on Twitter.

The offering counts the number of times a term is mentioned on the microblogging site, then presents that data in a bar graph that can be sorted by day. Twitter users are sorted by customer, vendor, employee and other categories.

Brand names can also be paired to other keywords or phrases for more granular tracking.

"After using Twitter a lot I realized it takes an enormous amount of time to monitor your brand," said Director-Solution Architecture Adam Greco of Omniture.

"These tweets are nothing more than text comments that we could incorporate in our suite platform."

SiteCatalyst's Twitter tracker will also enable marketers to set alerts. When a customer's brand has been mentioned a certain number of times in an hour, it will send notifications by email or text.

Reports include the complete tweets, users' Twitter account names and related names; and geographical location.

Existing Twitter metrics sources include Twitstat, TweetVolume, TweetScan, and Twitter's own analytics offering, ClickZ writes, although Omniture believes its advantage lies in SiteCatalyst's ability to tie Twitter reporting to other offerings.

Future variants include suggested keyword suggestions, based on words associated with the brand on Twitter.