BackType

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.

Twitter has become an increasingly important part of online conversation, especially to us here at BackType. We’re focused on improving the way you discover news online; not only does news sometimes break on Twitter, but billions of reactions to news are now published in 140 characters or less. However, often the vast majority of reactions were RT-ed or come from Twitter bots; those reactions can be pretty uninteresting, even spam-like.

In pursuit of creating the best search engine for news and opinions, we built technology to discern between the interesting and non-interesting tweets so we can show you the best tweets reacting to news in our search results:

Today, we’re releasing the feature across our website as well as in widget and WordPress plugin forms to help bloggers/publishers deliver the same value to their readers. In fact, the plugin is running right here on this blog underneath each post: it will show you the best reactions from Twitter; if we haven’t found any yet, it lets readers tweet directly from the widget.

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WordPress announced the release of version 2.9 “Carmen” today; we’ve updated our WordPress plugins for support. BackType Tweetcount was updated and you’ll need to upgrade to version 2.0 if you’re running WordPress 2.9. BackType Connect did not require an update, so if you’re already running version 0.2.5 you should be fine.

Bitly Pro Support

One of the unique features of our Tweetcount button is its support for custom URL shorteners – we debuted with support for short URLs powered by Awe.sm. Today, we’ve updated Tweetcount to also updated to support Bitly Pro; the button will work with your custom Bitly short URLs. Once you’ve obtained your custom Bitly-powered short URL, visit the BackType Tweetcount options page and enter your API credentials.

Tweetcount now supports: bt.io (default), awe.sm (custom), bit.ly, bit.ly pro, su.pr, digg.com and tinyurl.

BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter. Searching with keywords will match any URL they’re used in; full URLs will help track links to articles, blog posts, videos and whatever else you’re interested in.

Now you can add alerts for the searches you’re following and receive updates via e-mail. Like BackType Alerts, you can set your emails to be delivered immediately, daily, or once a week.