BackType

We’re thrilled to announce that BackType has been acquired by Twitter! We’ll be bringing our team and technology to Twitter’s platform team, where our focus will be developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners.

Our vision at BackType has always been to help our customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. We also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.

Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience. We’re also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company.

What happens to BackType?

The BackTweets product will now be offered to current users for free. However, as we begin to focus on our work at Twitter, we will not be accepting any new registrations for BackTweets, and we will discontinue the BackType product and API services.

Our team’s relocating to the Twitter office. We’re very excited to not only join an amazing company that’s changing the world, but to continue building products in pursuit of our shared vision with Twitter.

Finally, I’d like to thank all our investors and advisors, especially Y Combinator, Toni Schneider and True Ventures, Josh Felser and David Samuel from Freestyle Capital, Manu Kumar, Chris Sacca, Raymond Tonsing and Seth Berman.

Follow us on Twitter: @golda, @michaelmontano, @nathanmarz, @bakkdoor

BackType helps you understand the business impact of social media — we measure engagement and its impact on KPIs like revenue, page views, sign ups, downloads and more. But what happens when social media isn’t directly involved in a conversion funnel? a purchase funnel? Is it possible that your customers saw a tweet that influenced them to make a purchase hours, days, weeks or months later? Marketers need to understand the impact of every opportunity; quantifying attribution beyond the final point of conversion is critical, especially with social media.

We wanted to investigate attribution on Twitter, so we took a look at our own service, BackTweets, and its customers. Twitter traffic to BackTweets rarely converts to sign ups, but we found that 58% of our BackTweets Pro customers were exposed to a tweet linking to BackTweets before they became customers.

Here’s a look at one of our customers and the relevant tweets they were exposed to before conversion:

This particular BackTweets customer potentially saw three tweets from people they were following that linked to backtweets.com, and then 16 days after the last tweet they signed up for a trial. Even if this customer saw one of the last two tweets and clicked on the link, we know they didn’t sign up then and there, so it would be impossible to attribute Twitter to part of the purchase funnel – until now.

Want this type of analysis for your customers? Contact us.

Since we decided to focus exclusively on social analytics less than a year ago, interest in BackType has exploded. Thousands of people use our product every day, thousands have applied for access to our private Beta, and we’ve served billions of API calls and widget impressions. Users of both our product and API love BackType.

However, most of what we have to offer is still behind closed doors. We want to change that, so we recently raised $1MM+ from top tier angel and venture investors to help. The capital will help us grow the team, continue to invest in product development and launch our upcoming paid product later this year; the new investors help provide the insight and experience that will support our growth in 2011 and beyond. At BackType, we’ve built the the most advanced system to analyze social data in the world, and our new product is going to leverage all of that technology.

Meet Our Investors

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Here’s what we discovered during the period graphed:

• 50K Twitter users sent out related tweets
• At its peak, there were 28 tweets being sent out per second
• Tweets showed up as many as 329M times (our impressions metric) in peoples’ streams
• Up to 26M unique Twitter users were reached (our reach metric)

More via TechCrunch

Earlier this week, a meme erupted on Twitter based on the #LessAmbitiousMovies hashtag. The premise was to modify a movie title to be “less ambitious”. TechCrunch wrote about the meme as it was happening.

Last night we put our analytics platform to work and looked into exactly what happened. We capture, process and store every message sent on Twitter so it was easy for us to look at all the recent tweets containing #lessambitiousmovie, #lessambitiousfilm, or #lessambitiouscinema.

Here’s what we discovered as of yesterday:

• 364K tweets in the meme from 81K Twitter users
• Each participant tweeted out an average of 4.5 movie titles
• At its peak, there were 17 titles being sent out per second
• Tweets showed up as many as 300M times (our impressions metric) in peoples’ streams
• Up to 27M unique Twitter users were reached (our reach metric)

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BackType is doing better than ever and we’re starting the new year in a new office right in Union Square! We’re growing the team and felt it was extremely important to have an office in a location that’s very accessible to employees (incl. future hires), customers, partners, investors, etc. 2400 square feet of office space with access to public transportation, food (open late), gyms, parking, you name it.

2011 is going to be BackType’s best year yet and we’re hiring!

Identifying influencers is an increasingly important part of social media marketing for companies of all sizes. Today we’re releasing profiles that help you understand the influence of every active Twitter user:

These profiles include a score from 1-100 using a proprietary algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank to indicate how influential a user is. More specifically, the score is based on an examination of a user’s interactions and reach. We’ve also created an influence graph which tells us who you influence and who influences you.

Go ahead and type your @username into the search box on http://www.backtype.com to see your profile. Please send us your feedback.

BackType’s API has become extremely popular over the past year. We consistently serve hundreds of millions of requests to developers, partners and customers. One of the things powered by our API is the BackType Connect WordPress plugin, which has also grown in popularity.

Unfortunately, because of the demanding needs of the plugin (to update conversations in a timely fashion) and limited resources we won’t be able to support it any longer. It sucks to have to kill off awesome products and features we built in the past, but we’re focused on our new product.

Some good news: you can use Disqus for the same functionality, powered by BackType! It’s also possible to recreate the WordPress plugin to work with the API changes we’ve made recently – we really hope there are some developers out there up to the task. How? Read the rest of this entry »

In lieu of recent and upcoming changes to BackType, we’ve decided to retire user profiles – the claiming and user organization of blog comments. It’s a feature we love, but unfortunately does not have a place in the new product. It follows that tweeting comments that make it to your profile will also stop. User profiles will be removed on Wednesday, April 21; we apologize for any inconvenience.

Note: comments will still be aggregated by BackType and accessible through our website; however, users will no longer have the ability to explicitly claim any comments

At BackType, we’re constantly experimenting and prototyping – to help us explore new ideas, learn and have fun. BackType Labs is another place for us to show you some of the stuff we’re working on.

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