

Ask HN: Review our startup, PubliciTweet - jmathai
http://publicitweet.com

======
dc2k08
First off, great design and layout, very clean and pretty too. It compliments
twitter well. However, it's not clear to me what the service does. The first
feature listed on the 'what you get page' says: PubliciTweet is a social media
marketing tool that helps you leverage those followers with unique campaigns
and tools to track your success.

This works more as an opening tagline and might be better suited to the
homepage. From the homepage, I get the idea that PubliciTweet is a service
where I can queue a series of tweets at various intervals . PubliciTweet then
tracks and graphs which tweets by measuring clickthroughs perhaps. When I
click 'learn more' - I don't learn actually learn any more. Maybe an in depth
description could go here explaining the guts of it or a video demo.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks! I've been wanting to do a video demo. That's probably one of the
upcoming changes to the site. I agree that the 'learn more' page is probably
too wordy as well. Hoped that the bullet points would help clearly define what
the service does..but will add more clarity on the home page.

~~~
dc2k08
Just to be clear, I think the 'learn more' page is not wordy enough. I think
you should elaborate more on what the service does. There is more info on the
home page than the 'learn more' page.

~~~
jmathai
Ok, thanks for clarifying. I often shy away from providing too much verbosity
in terms of text. Sometimes I think people's eyes glaze over quickly. Good to
know you would like to find out more about the service and are willing to read
about it. Can definitely expand the learn more section.

------
Tichy
"Direct message all Twitter followers"

I already hate you for that. Don't advise your clients to do that.

~~~
jmathai
What's the deal with so many people hating DMs on Twitter? We provide the
option to send DMs to groups of followers. Our hope is that Twitter will end
up being a place where companies that provide valuable content (via DM or
otherwise) have lots of followers and ones which don't...do not. No harm done
if a spammer with few followers sends mass DMs. It really comes back to
inflating follower #s which needs to go away if Twitter is to become a true
tool for communication.

The bottom line is that you have the option of not following people you feel
send you unwanted messages.

Let me know if I'm way off base or missing something here.

Thanks for the feedback though.

~~~
Tichy
I think in most cases I would consider it an abuse of my trust if a company I
followed would send me marketing related DMs. Following on Twitter is _NOT_ an
invitation to send me DMs. It means - "ok, I am reasonably interested to let
your blurts flickr across my screen, and perhaps by chance I'll catch
something interesting now or then". If I want more, I can subscribe to a
newlsetter or something.

DMs are extremely intrusive, as they also trigger a notification email. They
should be reserved for stuff that needs to be private, or is urgent. Both
doesn't apply to marketing blurps.

Why the hate - because DMs multiply the cost of following somebody by a lot.
Whereas initially it is just one click "oh heck, why not", it ends up being a
hassle of a LOT more clicks and wasted brain cycles.

Edit: why I said "don't advise your clients to do that" - my most likely
reaction would be to unfollow that user, and I think many feel the same. Of
course perhaps marketing will find that it is still worth it (just as
newsletters work, even though everybody hates them).

~~~
jmathai
Valid points. One of our main goals is to curb spam usage. Just to let you
know some of the ways we plan on doing that.

1) We'll be introducing a pay model which should weed out the majority of
spammers (CTR won't be high enough).

2) A free version will be limiting enough that it won't be worthwhile for
spammers.

3) We have an artificial limit placed on "groups" so you can only DM N (500
atm) followers at a time.

If you have other ideas we'd love to hear them. We wouldn't post a site
intended for spam on HN :).

In addition to that, I think Twitter should employ more robust emails (or just
buy out Topify) that let's you easily block or unfollow users directly from
the DM email.

Thanks for clarifying your original post.

------
workhorse
Setup OAuth, ClickPass, Google Friendconnect, OpenID, or some other
registration method.

<http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ>

I run a Twitter tool that started out using Direct Messages, but found that
CTR in DM's are horrible. I had to switch to public status updates with
@username.

~~~
jmathai
We use OAuth to link Twitter accounts. Our OAuth implementation was done
before Twitter added "login with Twitter".

OpenID isn't yet widely adopted (not enough for us to really support it ---
chicken and egg anyone?).

I do like the simplicity of 'login with Twitter' but haven't seen any evidence
yet that our sign up page has many bounces.

We have 96% of users that link at least one Twitter account to their
PubliciTweet account. Which was quite a surprise to us.

------
aw3c2
You can save traffic if you compress your images better. You could probably
optimize them for better results, but even a plain "optipng -o7 *.png" for the
frontpage stripped away about 180 Kilobytes.

Also comsider using JPEG for some images, it might be much smaller. Using a
small palette and no transparency is the key for small PNG.

~~~
jmathai
Site optimization took a back seat so we could launch it early. I'm generally
a stickler about sprites and whatnot - none of which are used on the site. JS
and css is combo'ed and minified but that's all.

optipng would be an easy fix though and will try to do that for the next
release.

Thanks for the feedback.

------
chrischen
Maybe you could add support for other social networks? I mean when a company
thinks about going social, they'd probably want to establish a presence on
multiple networks. Maybe they want to target the facebook demographic instead
of the twitter demographic?

~~~
jmathai
Adding in Facebook is probably next. Though, I think it will take a little
while for us to really iron out the kinks with campaigns on Twitter. Thanks
for the feedback!

------
jmathai
I had asked once before but we've added a handful of features and didn't get a
lot of response last time.

------
adrianwaj
I'd prefer a tweet message than a DM from a corporate that wants my money.

~~~
jmathai
One issue with the public timeline is that you can't really get metrics for
which follower did what. When sending a DM campaign you can see which follower
referred the most clicks.

That being said, you can send it to your public timeline or to a group of
followers. It's up to the company to decide which one works better and that's
part of what the analytics are for.

The target company is one who has special promotions and giveaways and has
followers who value their offers.

~~~
adrianwaj
Can't you just provide a unique shortened URL within each tweet sent (or a
hashtag) and track if it was RT'ed (when and by who) or the individual link
clicked? You can have an opt-in/opt-out on the linked page too.

~~~
jmathai
We do provide a unique shortened url per tweet/dm. For the public timeline
it's more difficult to track the "referal".

We have thought about putting in a beacon of some sort. An issue with that is
that a beacon (like #zs8) is one of the first things to be removed from a RT
if it's not a valid hashtag. A url, however, is rarely removed from a RT since
it's pertinent to the message.

We're still thinking about how to track RTs from the timeline. The new retweet
API will most likely help and make timeline campaigns more valuable.

An "opt out" page on our site is a good idea. One issue is we don't do an
interstitial on which to display that link. Have to figure out a good way to
make that visible. Thanks.

~~~
Tichy
Perhaps interesting in that context is that Twitter seems to have started to
track clicks for users of the web site. (Clicks go through a referral page so
Twitter can count them).

I don't recall them announcing anything about what they want to do with it,
but it seems like it could become part of a commercial offering.

Unfortunately it only works for users on the web site.

~~~
jmathai
Yea, if the majority of traffic was from the website then we could possibly
track clicks based on the referer.

------
joshsharp
<http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/>

~~~
jmathai
Long domain, short content. Any reasons why not to use Twitter for marketing?

