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

http://www.wil.lt

by michaelrlitt • 15 years ago

105 48 15 years ago

wil.lt

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

andrewcross• 15 years ago

Does anything else like this exist?

zabeth246• 15 years ago

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

Alex3917• 15 years ago

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

akennberg• 15 years ago

This makes a lot of sense

zabeth246• 15 years ago

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

lukelockhart• 15 years ago

Interesting. This looks useful.

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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.

endlessvoid94• 15 years ago

AddThis does something similar, but not nearly as useful.

mrmch• 15 years ago

Looking forward to testing this in a new app =]

surajreddy• 15 years ago

Awesome indeed - way to go!

tareqismail• 15 years ago

This is neat, will give it spin.

imjimmurphy• 15 years ago

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

dwack• 15 years ago

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.

zabeth246• 15 years ago

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.

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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!

watchandwait• 15 years ago

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

askhader• 15 years ago

As good as Jesus, then?

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

The second testimonial makes me think this is a parody.

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

amitparikh• 15 years ago

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

josephfung• 15 years ago

looking forward to giving it a try. cool.

Jasonp• 15 years ago

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

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

nawariata• 15 years ago

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

mbrzuzy2• 15 years ago

"[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.

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

mbrzuzy2• 15 years ago

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.

MrSourz2• 15 years ago

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

dotBen• 15 years ago

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?

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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.

zabeth246• 15 years ago

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.

ptm• 15 years ago

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 ?

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

Yes!

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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?

PanMan• 15 years ago

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).

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

ozataman• 15 years ago

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

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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

matdwyer• 15 years ago

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...

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

Great! We'll look into that

jasonmcalacanis• 15 years ago

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

fraserharris14• 15 years ago

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 ;-)

zabeth246• 15 years ago

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!

taf2• 15 years ago

seems similar to http://gopromo.it/

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

Related Stories