Socialping Blog | Twitter Analytics, Monitoring, and Notifications

Have Any Twitter New Year’s Resolutions?

05January

It’s that time of year and everyone, including us, is thinking about New Year’s resolutions. We’ve got a ton of goals that we’re setting for ourselves, and some of them are Twitter related; so that got us thinking, is anyone else setting New Year’s goals/resolutions related to their Twitter accounts?

We’ve got the usual types of goals, more Twitter interaction and engagement, more followers and what may seem odd, more friending on our part (we’re sometimes a bit too selective on friending).

If you’re setting Twitter goals, don’t forget that you can use Socialping to track many of these no matter which type of goal you set, percentage-based or actual number based.

If you’ve got any Twitter goals, please let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear them, and we might even add it to our resolutions as well.

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Recent Changes (12/19/11)

19December

by Joel Strellner

So what’s new at Socialping? Lots. And here’s the skinny on what has been recently deployed:

New chart option allowing you to flip between Absolute Values and Daily Change Values on the Twitter account reporting pages. Essentially, you can now easily switch between seeing total number vs just the changes when looking at or comparing the count of your daily mentions, tweets, friends, followers and lists that you are on (Hat tip to @netzaffin for the suggestion; have one yourself? Email us at support [at] socialping com).
Initial deploy of the individual tweet page. This is where you’ll go to work with a single tweet when it’s all complete (you can review, then reply, rt, assign, etc from this page).
Tweet approval queues is now live, but in limited beta. To get into the limited beta of this feature, shoot us an email at support [at] socialping com. Tweet approval queues allow you to require all outbound tweets on your Twitter account to be approved by an administrator before it goes out.
Our LiveConference Tweet Wall automatic reconnect methodology has been enhanced to more reliably automatically reconnect and catch up if your internet drops out during your event.
Our LiveConference Tweet Wall’s curse word filter support has been enhanced to reduce the processing power needed to check the quite extensive list we have of all things bad word-ish.
Numerous bug fixes and minor text changes throughout.

And what’s coming up? We can’t say, but it’ll be awesome. If you’re not already doing so, follow @socialping for sneak peak screenshots on the things we’re working on. And of course, if you’re not already using Socialping, sign up now.

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Using Socialping: for Twitter ROI Measurement

06December

by Joel Strellner

This is part of our Using Socialping series of posts, where we give a general overview on different use cases for Socialping. We try to keep things a bit general. Have any questions on the details? Just ask in the comments are below.

How many of you measure your return on investment (ROI) on Twitter? Do you know how many followers you’re getting, mentions, or reach? Can you easily determine how these things have changed over time? If not, you are not really measuring the ROI of your Twitter activities.

First, there are a number of ways to look at ROI, there’s the typical financial ROI, in which you’re looking to see if your actually profiting from your endeavors, and then there’s the “buzz” factor, where you are just trying to see if people are becoming more aware of your business and what it does. I’m going to show you how to use Socialping for both of these methods.

Twitter ROI Tracking: Financial

Using Socialping to track if you are actually making sales from Twitter can be tricky, and there will always be a little bit of a grey area here, but one way to track if you are making sales is to use Socialping to track the tweets that link to your website.

Socialping is quite a bit different than the other monitoring tools. We give you the ability to monitor for domain names (yourcompany.com), as well as specific URLs (http://yourcompany.com/product/page.html).

To see if there is any potential for sales, the first thing you should do is monitor Twitter for Tweets that link to pages on your domain. The Tweets may not reference anything else related to your website or your business, but if it links to your domain, you need to know about it.

If you have specific action pages on your site that you want to track, like landing pages, you probably want to track those as well, and fortunately Socialping can help. And if you are A/B testing landing pages for people from Twitter, tracking specific URLs is essential to see how many potential people could have seen your tweets, and even how many actually clicked on the links.

Whether you are tracking any link mentioning your domain (really useful for content sites), or you are tracking specific landing page links, you’ll want each to be in it’s own Watchlist. This will allow you to view the Watchlist Reports that show you the volume of mentions, reach and who the influencers are for the time periods you select.

Creating Watchlists in Socialping is easy, if you you just created an account, using the First Setup flow that you go through after creating your account is the easiest. Just signup, and follow the steps.

If you already have an account, to create a watchlist, go to your Dashboard or Watchlists page and then click on the link to, “Add a New Watchlist” located in the top right corner of the page.

Twitter ROI Tracking: Buzz Factor

Tracking buzz on Twitter surrounding your business requires a two-prong approach. Not only will you need to track mentions and comments about your business name, but you’ll also want to track your Twitter accounts, and how many followers, mentions, retweets, Klout and more it’s gaining or losing.

Tracking mentions of your businesses real name is going to be performed using Watchlists, and each of those Watchlists will have the different variations of your company name, and website domains. To create a watchlist, go to your Dashboard or Watchlists page and then click on the link to, “Add a New Watchlist” located in the top right corner of the page.

To Track your Twitter accounts, you’ll need to add the account to Socialping. This can be done from the dashboard, or your account settings page. All you need to do here is authorize it with Twitter, and we’ll automatically start tracking mentions, followers, the links you share (and the clicks they receive), which tweets caused you to receive the most followers and more.

Wrap Up

The most important thing to determine, is exactly what your purpose on Twitter is, and then from there you can easily determine exactly what you need to track. So what is your purpose on Twitter? How are you using Socialping to accomplish this?

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Recent Changes (11/28)

28November

by Joel Strellner

It’s been a really long time since we put out a new blog post, and so much has happened. As you may or may not know, Socialping is live for anyone to sign up. That’s a huge jump up from what we’ve been our entire life, in private beta.

We are constantly changing things, most of which we feel is for the better, but sometimes we implement them knowing that it’s going to upset a few of our users. Today is one of those days… Just a little bit ago we deployed the code that enforces the monthly Tweet limits on accounts. Up until now, even though every plan had a specific limit to the number of Tweets you could bring in each month, you could happily bring in a million tweets a day into your account, and our systems wouldn’t even let you know that you went so far over your limit, let alone actually enforce the limit. As of today, that is going to end.

The unfortunate reality for us is that we have to pay for each Tweet that comes into our systems, and not in the total expenses divided by total tweets that come into our systems sense, but in the actual hard number sense. We literally pay Twitter for each and every Tweet.

We understand the need to test the reliability and accuracy of Socialping, but some accounts were bringing in hundreds of thousands of tweets per month as a test (which they likely just forgot about). And since we pay for each of the Tweets, these tests become very expensive for us very quickly.

This new process will send you warning emails at 50% of your limit, 80% of your limit, 90% of your limit and finally at 95% of your limit. Finally, if you hit 100% of your monthly limit, your account will be paused until you upgrade to a plan that offers more Tweets per month, or you hit your account cycle date (approximately the same date every month).

Regarding some of the better changes that we’ve recently made, recently we added RSS feeds for each of your watchlists, released a really awesome first time account setup process that walks you through the entire process of setting up your account, upgraded a few parts of our LiveConference (Twitter wall) manager, and most importantly, fixed a ton of bugs throughout Socialping.

Each week we deploy anywhere from 3 to 10 new features and bug fixes and it is our goal to start letting you guys know via blog posts exactly what we released for you, hopefully we can do this update weekly.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

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Infrastructure

21April

by Joel Strellner

There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about outsourcing your infrastructure to companies like Amazon’s AWS service, or Rackspace’s Cloud Servers and others.

This mentality is wrong, for most people.

Today we are in the middle of a massive Amazon outage that has been going on for many hours already, and no concrete time frame is available for when it will come online again, which brings me to my first point: using a service like AWS means you don’t get the one-on-one customer support you need when running a business that has critical needs, like 100% uptime.

Sure there are ways to load balance between available zones, but as today proves, even that doesn’t always work. In order to be truly available, you need multiple datacenters and those datacenters must from from multiple providers and be far apart from each other, like one on the east coast and the other on the west coast.

My other point is related to billing. Cloud servers ARE NOT CHEAPER, when you run them 24/7. Many people have cited cost savings as the main reason to use AWS. I don’t know about you, but every time I have tested this theory, it always worked out that it was cheaper to use dedicated servers than it did using a virtualized server. Additionally, with virtualized servers, you typically also get reduced disk I/O, network latency and more which make your service run slower.

How many services need to scale up and down their infrastructure daily? Far less than you might think. Today, Foursquare, Quora, CoTweet, Hootsuite, and I’m sure dozen’s more of popular services are offline because of the AWS outage. The only one I see that is likely benefiting from scaling up and down servers is probably Foursquare, the rest probably have their servers running 24/7.

Until recently we’ve always hosted our servers at Steadfast Networks. In the recent months, we switched to using ServerBeach as our primary provider. With both of them, we’ve used multiple dedicated servers in a load balanced, high availability manner. We also use replication and a few other techniques to make sure that our customers data is safe and our service is online all the time. We learned this the hard way in the past.

I know that this post is different from most of our posts on our blog, but we have a lot of experience working with these cloud services, and in that time have determined, they just are not worth it.

We know many people feel strongly about using them. Feel free to let us know why in the comments below.

Posted in Infrastructure, Scaling | Tagged infrastructure | Leave a comment

Ok, not that fast, but moving along…

06February

by Joel Strellner

While it has certainly been taking longer than I had hoped, I wanted to quickly update our blog letting you guys know that we are moving along and we’ve got a lot of nice things implemented.

As mentioned in our original post, we’re building our new web app on top of our new API, which is also on our new backend (MongoDB and MySQL). This has been working really well for Socialping since it is making everything run faster, will scale much better and we can ensure that if we can do it on our site, you can do it yourself via the API.

Our Notification System is fully operational and supports more notification methods than our original implementation did. This new system has a lot of benefits – most importantly, it’s fast, really fast – but it also includes the ability for us to add new notification methods quickly. Tonight we added our 12th notification method – It was Notifo, and it took just an hour to get it fully up and running (also in part because of their excellent documentation and awesome PHP Library).

Adding watchlist items and tags is also fully complete. Deleting them via the API is possible and our web app is nearly ready to release the UI to do this.

We have a really robust user management feature that allows you to add users to your account so they can tweet, view reports, set up their own notifications and more. It’s a very fine-grained solution too. Don’t want a specific user you just added to be able to send tweets? No problem, just disable that feature from their privileges.

LiveConference (Our Tweet wall feature) is fully functional, as is our Tweet wall manager (allows you to prevent users, keywords or tweets that originated in certain twitter apps from appearing on your tweet wall). The UI for customizing the look and feel of your tweet wall should be completed in the near future. We’ve done over a dozen events recently where they utilized our tweet wall and we have a number of them in the near future.

The UI for interacting with tweets has been planned out and we are finally starting to work on that.

We have a new snazzy reporting console as well. You can see Tweet and Retweet volume, unique and absolute reach, percentage of Tweets vs Retweets, time of day distribution, most popular Twitter users, most interaction with the terms you are watching, and can break those down by overall, just tweets or just Retweets. You can also export the charts as PDF’s and other various image formats right from withing the report interface so you can include them in emails or internal reports. This doesn’t even include the account related stats that we are starting to track.

So, while it is taking a bit longer than expected, hopefully this is reassuring to the thousands of people on our waiting list. We’re already letting a few of the larger companies in, and they are stress testing it out. Expect some big announcements soon.

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Going that way, really fast.

13September

by Joel Strellner

I was just reading an interesting post on Coding Horror about iterating quickly and it got me thinking about all the iterating we’re doing on Socialping. Granted we’re a small company and have been given the opportunity to make dozens of changes without having to support a previous version or transition data, there’s still a lot to be said about the speed that things are changing.

So, here’s an update: By now we’ve finished most of the API and we’ve got a new back-end in testing that is going to hopefully support us much better than the old setup did (for the nerds reading this, we’re using MongoDB for our tweets, Redis for a few things that need really fast access times, and MySQL for the account info).

At this point we’re still planning on rolling out a retrofitted version of the site using our new API instead of it having direct access, I think we are going to be doing more changes to the code than I anticipated, and thus there are likely going to be a few things that in fact, totally new.

I’m starting to get a bit of “can’t wait to release it” excitement because finally a number of the pieces are starting to talk to each other. Just a few more talking pieces and we’ll have our MVP out and we’ll get to start iterating on it while you guys are trying to break it. Exciting stuff.

Want to help us break it when it comes out? Register for the beta here.

Posted in Beta v2, Scaling | 3 Comments

Doing the Retrofit

09September

by Joel Strellner

As you may know, we’re doing a bit of remodeling to Socialping since we were given the unfortunate ability to start clean. In an effort to try and be more open about everything going on behind the scenes, today I wanted to outline a bit of what’s happening to Socialping and what the process will be for bringing it back online.

We mentioned in our last post about how the API was going to be our new focus and the foundation for the new Socialping site. What we also mentioned in that post was that we were going to be making a bunch of changes to the UI to focus on the features that our users used most, this is still true, but before we focus on the new UI, we’re going to modify our old UI code base to work with the new API’s.

In addition to the new API, we’ve reworked a bunch of our back end to reduce latency and allow for a better scale out procedure. Because of the new architecture, we can’t use the old code as-is, so we’re going to modify it to use the API’s. While it seems odd to bring back our old site, but using the new API’s, we feel it’s necessary for our users to be back up and running as soon as possible. The new site will be rolled out shortly after we get back online.

So, to sum things up, we’re finishing up the API and new back-end now, then once that’s done we plan on making our old UI work with the new API’s, and then finally we’re going to be bringing up the new, yet still familiar UI that we’ve conjured up.

And finally, I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the Socialping users that have emailed me with their comments about what happened and offered suggestions for how we can come back stronger. Your understanding of what happened has made this difficult situation much easier to cope with, so thank you. If you haven’t already emailed me, I welcome you to do so (joel at socialping com).

Oh, and one final thing, if you’re interested in Socialping v2, please sign up for the beta here. We’re going to be letting people in very, very soon.

Posted in Beta v2 | Tagged api, beta | Leave a comment

New Beginnings, and Eating Our Own Dog Food

05September

by Joel Strellner

Since we’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate enough to start over on Socialping (depending on how you look at it), we have an awesomely unique opportunity to 100% eat our own dog food, and we’re going to.

In Socialping’s v1 beta, the API was an after thought, and because of it, there were a lot of features that you could do in the web interface, but you couldn’t in the API. This was somewhat OK, but only because our iPhone app was the only thing that actually used the API. And even that wasn’t being used by many since it hasn’t been released in the app store yet. There has been a lot of talk recently about API’s and that they are good for business – I’m hoping that with the new focus on the API, we can prove that to ourselves.

Oh, and that dog food part? Socialping’s new site is going to be using the API for everything, and if we can’t do something we need to do in the API, we’ll add it.

It’s been a long weekend since we started working on the new Socialping, but we can already create new accounts and users, add watchlist items, tags/groups and more, all via our new API.

We’ve gotten a few suggestions already from our users on things that they’d like to see in the new Socialping, but we can always use more. What would you like to see in the new Socialping? What notification methods would you like to have access to? Let us know in the comments below.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, sign up for our new beta program to have access to Socialping as soon as it’s ready.

Posted in Beta v2 | Tagged api, beta | 3 Comments

Socialping is effed, and it’s my fault

04September

by Joel Strellner

Earlier today something happened, something that I hate to even think about, but it happened. Our main database, where we store user account information, like the users, companies and what terms are being watched got deleted – and the worst part? I did it. I didn’t do it on purpose of course, but it happened because I clicked the wrong thing, and then didn’t read the prompt that was put there to save people from doing what I did. To make matters worse, the backups that we were making stopped getting made so long ago that what we have is useless. There is going to be no recovery of data.

Even though Socialping is still in private beta – and beta programs are called beta specifically because unforeseen things can and do happen – we never treated Socialping like it was a beta program, we always tried to act as if our users were paying us. That is why it saddens me so much to have to break this news to you guys.

All is not lost though, even though the account data is (tweets are OK, even though they are pointless now without account data to associate with), we’ve learned so much about what we do, and because what has happened, we have the unique ability to start fresh. We’ve been planning on pivoting Socialping for a while now, due to the recent survey that we had all of our users complete. That survey told us lots of things, but most importantly, what exactly our users wanted out of Socialping.

Starting immediately, we are going to rebuild Socialping, keeping the parts that matter and canning the rest. We are laser focused on our notification capabilities and reporting, since combined 80% of you said that those two things were the main features that you guys use Socialping for. And don’t worry if you like to export your tweets our use our LiveConference feature, those aren’t going anywhere either.

Socialping Beta v2 will be out soon. We hope to see you join the new beta program. Just like before, it’s going to be first come, first served, so get in asap.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

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