The Story of our Twitter Monitoring Startup
It began with a jam between Twitter and Alert.
“It’s a Twitter monitoring tool, something we built for a client and ended up adopting as our own. It allows you to get Twitter search alerts by email.”
“It’s called Twilert.”
It sounded okay, but similar. Free tools like Google alerts, Tweetdeck and others within my social media manager arsenal could do the same thing. How was this different?
A few days later, I knew.
Different from Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck allows you to track keywords, hashtags and users but it has to be a conscious decision. You have to remember to open the app, to check it. When you’re busy, checking Tweetdeck may just slip your mind. The same goes for saved Twitter searches.
Twilert sends the alerts to your inbox.
Different from Google Alerts
Google Alerts only alerts you if your key terms are found within the top ten web results across news and blogs. Great if you’re looking for updates on One Direction’s split, not so great if you’re tracking keywords for a company who makes an obscure brand of cheese.
Twilert monitors all of Twitter and Twitter is where nearly all coverage ends up.
Different from other social media monitoring tools
One of Twilert’s USPs is that it was developed before Firehose. This meant that unlike later social media monitoring tools, it had developed a way to work against the twitter search API in a scalable way. By not using Firehose it meant the costs could stay low for users whilst also being a reliable service.
Twilert cut out nearly all of the spam and produced every single important tweet. And was cheap.
Twilert was the type of tool that social media managers and digital marketers dreamed of. I knew because I was one. It had all the credentials; it saved time, it was affordable and it was so easy that everyone from the intern to the office manager could use it.
Suddenly, I was setting up Twilerts that tracked journalists who needed expert comments on stories. Bingo, free coverage for our tech startups.
Next, I was tracking anyone saying anything about four of the products within our product studio. By name, URL, handle and even misspelling. Without ever going near Twitter.
Later, I was helping PR companies, Universities, on-demand startups and a questionable type of shower gel find their niche audiences, competitors and the people talking about their brand (even when they didn’t know it yet).
I was hooked. And I worked there.
Luckily, others were too.
Twilert: the later years
Twilert had been successful long before I came on the scene. It had been featured by Mashable, added to ‘top tools’ lists by Shopify and Buffer and has successfully transitioned from a free tool to subscription service, still keeping its customers. No easy feat (funny story about that here).
By the time it was four years old, Twilert had a growing customer base and was steadily increasing in numbers and revenue. We were able to invest in the product, improve the infrastructure and add new features. 2014 saw the arrival of search previews, assumption testing through focus groups and the growth of a tool that was both effective and scalable.
Later, came an advanced Geolocation tool that allowed users to search for tweets within any area, postcode or City in the world. (Unfortunately, Twitter’s change to the Geolocation API a year later put a dent in that, but hey, you can’t say we didn’t try).
Where we are now
To bring the Twilert journey into the present day, it’s been a little neglected over the past six months or so. As often happens, Twilert got continued as a side project while some new products and big company partnerships came Codegent’s way. (Codegent is Twilert’s parent company if I missed that). We kept up the support and the customer service and we worked on bugs. We moulded around API changes and added to the stability of the core system, all the while adding user requests to a growing backlog of product features.
Our Trello board of suggestions was looking busy.
But we weren’t really giving Twilert the love and nuturing it had blossomed under during its earlier years.
Where we’re going
Twilert is a good product.
We know this because without touching it, it’s increased in revenue over the past 6 months. Here’s the graph to prove it:
What we want to do in 2016 is see how much more we can grow it with a little love and care.
Join us.
We’re treating Twilert 4.0 as a brand new version.
A big part of this, will be working out what makes Twilert’s users tick. Finding out how we can make their lives easier, faster, better. How we can develop features that they actually want and produce the articles and guidance that they need.
In a nutshell, we’ll be looking to help other marketers, social media experts and brand managers who, like a certain Marketing Manager at Twilert, will say “I’m hooked”.
So we’ll be writing about the tests we’re running, the math we use, the challenges we face and the ‘a ha’ moments of making our users want more. If you’d like to read along, give “The Twilert User Diary” a follow and you’ll be notified when we have new knowledge to share.
If you’d like to bag yourself a free trial of Twilert, you can sign up here
And if you’d like to hit recommend, then that would be okay too.
