Ask HN: Review our startup, PubliciTweet | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our startup, PubliciTweet

publicitweet.com

9 pointsjmathai31 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree with this poster - it looks great, like something I'd want to use, but I read the whole landing page and still didn't know what I could use it for.

Wow, that's bad! Thanks for the feedback. I was pretty focused on making the home page short and to the point. Guess it could use a bit of rework though. Good comments. :)

"Direct message all Twitter followers"

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

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.

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).

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.

> What's the deal with so many people hating DMs on Twitter?

How many people do you follow on Twitter? I manage an account that follows a few thousand (I use DMs for content submission), and I have to wade through so many useless DMs.

I agree with Tichy, reading this unfortunately made me disinterested.

I will say though, the design of the site is nice. I especially liked the footer graphic, which was a cute touch to the Twitter bird, if a bit cliched.

I follow about 63 people on Twitter. Don't really find the majority of users that interesting. But you follow several thousand so it doesn't really matter that I only follow 63 people.

That being said, we're definitely interested and proactively working on ways to provide value for users of our service and those that receive messages. I would say about 50% of the campaigns are sent via DM and the rest just to the public timeline. Our most valuable clients tend to use the one which makes the most sense to them.

We do have a few users that just spam their followers (per our definition of spam) and the updates listed in the other post will hopefully curb them off the site. Additional ideas would be great too.

I'd love to see Twitter provide more granular control over direct messaging and allowing you to follow a user but not accept DMs from them.

Thanks for the constructive criticism!

I don't have a problem with offering DMs. The recipient has the option to opt-out as a protest if they don't like it. Your stats will also show users if it is more bad than good presumably. You could also let users send an initial DM requesting whether or not the recipient would like to get further DMs. The main reason why you cannot afford to not offer DMs is another service will, and they then could scoop your customers.

I realized that one of the bolded phrases on the site is to Direct message all Twitter followers. That's not really our "intent" and so it's probably best for the service to not try and advertise it that way.

We're considering exactly what to replace it with :)

Thanks for pointing this out. It didn't seem immediately apparent to us that we were "coming off" that way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

So in order for you to track your metrics, you willing to annoy your client's followers. I am not sure that's a good idea.

This isn't intended to be scapegoating the situation but it's really up to our client how they decide to communicate with their followers. Depends on if they want to track metrics per follower.

http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/

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

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