An Awesomer Tweet Button: Tracks your site's most influential users | Hacker News Reader

An Awesomer Tweet Button: Tracks your site's most influential users

wil.lt

105 pointsmichaelrlitt48 comments

Great idea - I just don't understand why this needs a different/proprietary button in its implementation.

Surely this is just a case of analyzing twitter users who mentions your url (or any url with your domain, even), and then ranking them by Klout (or just follower score)?

(This would then pick up tweets that don't use a button, too.)

Point is, that is a backend process, why should I change my site's buttons?

a) The Twitter Search API is really flakey searching for urls. Twitter is shortening tweets with their own shortener, t.co, which is screwing it all up. We thought capturing 100% of tweets was important.

b) You can use any button you want. We provide simple iframe implementations for our button and a Twitter tweet button. We also give you code to attach to any js event.

Actually, we primarily look at just the clickthrough rate on the links to determine someone's influence. Influence is highly categorical.

For example, if I tweet about tech things, I'll get many clicks since most of my followers are techies. If I tweet about horses, ... not so many clicks and therefore I have a poorer influence for "horses".

Klout and # of followers abstract away these fine-grained details that, IMO, are critically important in determining social influence.

We've got 1 YC company using it already. Ask us anything!

Neat idea, just put it on my site. We don't get a ton of tweets (kind of the wrong audience) but it would be interesting to see. The only thing I'd suggest is a way to add them to follow us on twitter as well...

Great! We'll look into that

I'm looking forward to testing this out. Smart and simple. With thousands of followers I'm always curious who is most influence in their network... and Klout alone doesn't cut it.

Klout scores really show more of a relational-sort of data. I actually don't place much faith in the quality of their "ranking" system, IMO.

I've seen people with really high Klout scores because they are part of a small group of people that always respond to each others tweets.

We thought measuring click-throughs would be more useful for startups to see who can actually get the most people to take a look at what you are doing. If you can get those influential people as your ambassadors / talking you up, your golden!

I'm assuming you create a unique short url for each Twitter user. So retweets will be credited to the original tweeter. Is that correct ?

Yes!

Isn't this the same as http://totally.awe.sm/?

Not that we can tell. At a minimum, this is free and super simple to use. We asked around for a solution, and no one we knew had a good answer. This does one thing really well

"[My site's] love nearly doubled unique visits from 55 to 105 in less than 10 hours. www.wil.lt yourself."

How exactly would this increase traffic to your website? I thought this was an analytic tool.

He didn't have a tweet button before www.wil.lt? We just copied his tweet. We have no idea who he is.

Oh, didn't think about that. Just assumed people who would use this already use a tweet button and are interested in more statistical information regarding the people that tweet about their page.

I was thinking the same thing as you, makes sense now.

We are thinking about support custom urls. Ex: you assign the subdomain a.your_domain.com to us, we use that in the tweets. Would you pay $2 / month for this?

Yes. I would like to be able to use our own short URL, but twitter doesn't allow this by default ( I'm sure it can be built).

Yeah, its impossible to stop Twitter's t.co. The strangest part is that it only gets applied some of the time.

AddThis does something similar, but not nearly as useful.

As someone who doesn't know too much about this kind of stuff, this seems rather awesome.

It's very unclear whether that's a .LT or a .IT - Might be worth looking for a new URL.

We've also had other problems with our lithuanian domain registrar. We do not recommend .LT

What problems did you encounter? I own .lt domain purchased via french registrar without trouble.

1) (note this could be all wrong, but this is what we were told) You can't transfer registrar to outside of Lithuania 2) No Lithuanian registrar offers naked http redirects (ie: wil.lt/x -> www.wil.lt/x). Hence the www. on all of our links...

We are setting up forwarding the naked domain to a static IP that will do the http forwarding

(forgive me if I butchered the dns speak. not my domain haha)

seems similar to http://gopromo.it/

Sweet! Worth a try.... Love the click thru tracking too.

Looking forward to testing this in a new app =]

Does anything else like this exist?

You might be able to do it with HubSpot or PostRank, but we couldn't find anything simple. SO we built it!

ViralHeat and SocMetrics both provide similar features, but they cost money and are more complicated.

We wanted to keep things ultra simple. Oh, and FREE!

is there a site where we can see this in action?

http://www.vidyard.com has it integrated into their landing page -> just click "Get Notified"

The results on our landing page are real, updated every 15 minutes with our top 6 influencers

Interested in using us ;-)

Yes! Tweet using the button on our landing page. The results from that tweet will show up on the landing page if you rank among the top 6 influencers!

Awesome indeed - way to go!

looking forward to giving it a try. cool.

This is neat, will give it spin.

Interesting. This looks useful.

If you'd like to tie influencers directly to their accounts with you: you can pass in a unique ID, which will appear in the JSON influencer list.

This makes a lot of sense

Thanks! We're using it on our site now to see who is tweeting about the launch! Real-time results ftw!

The quote on your homepage comparing your service to Jesus is offensive.

As good as Jesus, then?

The second testimonial makes me think this is a parody.

He actually said it, but in jest. We thought HN would appreciate a little humor

The man was once blind and now he can see. I'd say that's a Jesus-like miracle.

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