SocialSev

The Concept

PubliciTweet is an analytics tool designed to help businesses monitor the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns. The service, developed by Yahoo! Software Engineer Jaisen Mathai, allows users to tweet their campaign immediately or schedule a specific date and time for the message to reach followers via the public timeline, direct messages, or both. The tracking tools provided include a graph of total clicks generated by the campaign and a mashed up Google map with markers indicating where the clicks are coming from and which follower referred them. PubliciTweet also provides a list of all of your followers. Their names are links to pages which display the same analytics tools mentioned above, specific to that follower. As the service is still in beta, the pricing structure has not been finalized. For now, the app is free to use and explore. So I did!

The Experience

My first experiment with PubliciTweet only reached about fifty of my followers. At first, we thought that Twitter had capped their DM limit, despite the fact that PubliciTweet was whitelisted. But as it turns out, it was my account that had reached the rate limit. Nonetheless, it was enough to get a quick snapshot of the features, but it left me wanting more. Once Mathai informed me that the issues were resolved, I created a second campaign two days later. This time, I scheduled my tweet to be delivered at 11:00 am via direct message only.  The results were much better as my DM was delivered to many more of my 328 followers. Within minutes, my PubliciTweet dashboard was displaying statistics. By the way, all of the pictures on this page are linked to a larger image. I can’t stand when you have to squint to make out the details of a screenshot.

As of this writing, my campaign has achieved a 27% conversion rate, indicating that my 328 followers generated 90 clicks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that 72 of my followers clicked the link in the DM. Rather, those clicks were generated by them. This could mean that they clicked the link themselves, but it could also mean that they retweeted the message and some of their followers clicked it. Thankfully, the map tool sorts that out for us. The markers on the map display the total clicks per geographical area, the followers responsible for those clicks, and how many referrals they generated. As you can see from the screenshot below, my follower @hartinc generated six clicks for my campaign in the Seattle area.

To drill down even further, I selected @hartinc from the list and viewed a page of stats specific to that follower. Greeted by the same interface as before, the page displayed a tracker of all of @hartinc’s click referrals and a map to indicate where those clicks occurred. The timing between the click tracker and the map are apparently a little out of whack as the statistics differ between the two. But it should be mentioned that I assessed these statistics within a matter of hours, not days. Over time, the statistics may level off.

First Impressions

Overall, PubliciTweet has the potential to be a useful tool for businesses to measure the success of their marketing campaigns on Twitter. As I explored the product, I couldn’t help but think that independent touring musicians could also benefit from the type of data that the app provides. For my test campaign, I linked to Chris Merritt’s page on thesixtyone. Merritt is a talented musician who could utilize a tool like PubliciTweet to locate pockets of fans throughout the country and focus his booking efforts accordingly. The service makes good use of the Twitter API and setup is  a cinch. PubliciTweet could be an ideal solution for small companies doing business across the country and throughout the world.

As the service is still in beta, I wasn’t expecting a completely polished, finished product. But there are a few features that are curiously missing that would add to the overall value and usability of the product. First, the “Track Clicks” feature allows you to adjust a slider to narrow the date range of the resulting statistics, but it doesn’t display hashmarks for hours. It would be helpful to have statistics on the specific times that the campaign was most effective in driving traffic. Twitter’s overall traffic patterns don’t necessarily reflect the traffic patterns of the user’s target demographic.

Next, it was helpful to view geographical data on where clicks are coming from and who referred them. However, the map is not an ideal interface for analyzing this kind of information. Hovering over multiple markers on the map to determine which users are driving the most traffic to your site would get tedious quickly. For a service built around determining the “precise effectiveness of the campaign,” PubliciTweet needs to make this information available at your fingertips. The current listing of followers is sorted by when they started following, newest to oldest. But ordering followers by total referrals would make the interface a much more efficient and usable experience. Time is money. Requiring the user to dig for information that could easily be compiled in an intuitive manner is a pretty big oversight.

And finally, the Recent Campaigns section provides literally no information on the campaign itself. There is no way to view the tweet that initiated the campaign or the URL it referenced. With only a pair of campaigns under my belt, it was easy for me to remember which was which. But once ten or twenty had been launched, it would be nearly impossible to determine the details of each one without tracking that information myself. It’s also perplexing that once a campaign has been scheduled, there’s no way to edit it prior to its launch. For instance, if I were to notice a typo as I was in the process of saving a new campaign, there’s no apparent way to go back and correct it or even delete it entirely.

Final Thoughts

While there are some pretty glaring oversights in the design, please remember that the service is still in beta. My three biggest gripes are all pretty easy fixes. Before users are charged to use the service, I expect that more functionality and usability will be incorporated into the design. While I was writing the PubliciTweet review,  Andrew Warner from Mixergy sent a DM asking how it was so far. My response to him was that it seemed like the team had a lot more experience in coding the back end than designing UI. It wasn’t until I made that statement that I realized that was probably the case. But I also believe that Mathai is sitting on a solid product with a lot of potential. This will be one to follow. I know that I, for one, will be writing about this IP again soon. I look forward to seeing what Jaisen and his team can produce in a short period of time. After all, one of Mathai’s previous projects, Textbook Revolt, was completed in only four weeks.