Meet the Team

Solution

Twitter analytics tool, tracking KPIs across dashboards.

Problem

Twitter significantly increased the price of its posts data API and placed a constricting rate limit on manually reading such data. Companies who wish to extensively analyze their Twitter content’s performance have no convenient way of doing so.

Value Proposition

Being independent of Twitter’s regulations.

Customer Segments

Differentiator

• North America- or Western ​Europe-based companies
  
• Start-ups, mid-size companies, ​concerned with improving their ​Twitter presence
  

Most use the targeted Social Media Platform’s API. Since Twitter restricted usage of its API, it is unlikely most switched to a new, unrestricted way of accessing Twitter data.

Competition

• Quintly
  
• RivalIQ
  
• Hootsuite
  

Key

Metrics

Revenue Streams

• tracked KPIs
  
• dashboard views per week
  
• Good Churn Rate - Continuous application active usage > 1 month
  

Cost Structure

• Monthly subscription, tiered by the ​maximum number of scannable ​accounts
  

• Servers
• Marketing campaigns
  
• Payrolls
  
• Utilities (office space)
  

Problem Identification

Following Elon Musk’s Tweet regarding the Twitter API rate limiting restrictive updates (for example, limiting a verified account to reading 6000 posts per day), traditional Twitter analytics relying on the API were no longer a scalable option.

Problem to Solution

A Twitter analytics tool, independent of its API, became necessary. Thus, we considered a solution based on web crawling.

Customer Discovery – Plan

• Initial minimum scoping - address brief questions via email to Social Media experts

• In-depth problem space scoping - schedule follow-up interviews
  

• Synthethize notes and extract problem space data
  

• Decide whether to maintain, change the addressed problem or conduct further discovery
  

Customer Discovery – Details

Question Set

• Focused on:
  
• SM Managers’ current data collection workflow
  
• Recent workflow changes & impact (due to new Twitter regulations)

Reached out via email to the following:

• 1 x Freelance Social Media Expert
  
• 1 x Social Media Marketer @Canopy (one of the largest Romanian Social ​Media agencies)
  
• 1 x Social Media Manager @UNTOLD
  

Customer Validation Accession

We are ready to proceed to the Customer Validation stage, because we had some really full of hope interviews with ​people with hands-on experience to this domain, as you can see down below:

Interviews

• Findings
  
• Target market - US, Western Europe
  
• Discovered which KPIs are usually tracked
• Proof
  
• Phone Interviews
  
• Email Conversations
  

Wireframe

Landing Page

• https://social-crawler.github.io/socialcrawler/
  
• The product itself is now accessible from the landing page
  

User Persona

• Figma Link
  
• TLDR:
• Marketing Managers
  
• Tech-savvy
• Aiming to increase company performance on social media platforms, ​under various constraints (time, data readibility, budget)
  

User Stories

• Was looking for an easy way to track follower evolution for managed profiles
• The main success indicator for their profiles is the number of retweets and replies, which indicates that the posts started discussions or were worth sharing with others
  

• In need of an affordable solution to benchmark the activity of their own page against their competition
• The main KPI to track for them is the overall activity on Twitter - that being the amount of posts and the posting frequency on the platform
  

• Searching for a cheap solution to compare the views (impressions) count for the managed pages and the competition
• In need of an easy - to - use application that can show them value with minimal effort
  

• Couldn’t afford other products, and the native platform analytics do not offer good benchmarking against competition
• Compares engagement rate across profiles
  

Use Cases

After analyzing the data we gathered from our interviews, we discovered two main use ​cases for our application:

• Benchmarking against competition on an array of various metrics
  
• Internal reporting on content campaigns for managed profiles, tracking the ​evolution of specific metrics over periods of time

Interviews

• Findings
  
• Potential Pain Point - Retweets Analysis
  
• Recent regulations affected the Twitter data collection workflow of some companies
  
• Proof
  
• F2F Interviews
  
• Social Media Conversations

Lead Generation and Collection

• Posts Screenshots
  
• Posts Permalinks
• Some have been taken down by admins
  
• https://www.facebook.com/share/z7NQBpMBxDJFB4Ek/?mibextid=K35XfP
  
• https://www.facebook.com/share/pDFRmUuGPnmKVpMe/?mibextid=K35XfP
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/s/oN5iA7C2jC
  

• Analytics Screenshots
  

• We shared our landing page link on Facebook and Reddit in relevant groups where we expected to find people

who had worked with social media and analytics before, while WhatsApp posts brought more personalized

engagement with a narrower audience.

• By analyzing the results and comparing the performance of different lead channels, we identified the channel

with the greatest impact, namely Facebook groups.

• Based on information provided in Google's documentation, it is evident that our organic social traffic primarily
  

originates from Facebook posts. Other platforms contribute to either referral or direct traffic, influenced

by browser and app privacy policies, as well as operating system settings.

Market Research

• Market Size:
  
• Global: 8.97B USD (2022) -> 10.99B USD (2023) -> 46.46B USD (2030, ​projected)
  
• U.S.: 1.2B USD (2021)

• Competitors: 30 competitors.
• Main ones: Linkfluence, Meltwater, Netvibes, GetSocial, Brandwatch, ​Quintly, RivallQ, Hootsuite
  

• Competitor market shares: see pie chart on the right
  

• Estimated Potential Market Share:
  
• Year 1: 0.001% (Starting small to gain traction)
  
• Year 2: 0.005%
  
• Year 3: 0.01%
  
• Year 4: 0.02%
  
• Year 5: 0.05%
  

• Total market value and the value of our market share:
  
• Year 1: Market share - 0.001% - value: 10 000$
  
• Year 2: Market share - 0.005% - value: 50 000$
  
• Year 3: Market share - 0.01% - value: 100 000$
  
• Year 4: Market share - 0.02% - value: 300 000$
  
• Year 5: Market share - 0.05% - value: 750 000$
  

Minimum Viable Product - MVP

http://socialcrawler.northeurope.cloudapp.azure.com/login

Functionalities

• We have built two basic functionalities.
  

• Search
  
• Gets the metrics of a Twitter profile.
  
• Initial UI:
  

• Sent the MVP to an NGO Social Media Manager. Received the feedback that ​it wasn’t very clear what this “Search” functionality does.
  

• Added a clarifying message, notified the user and received satisfactory ​feedback about it.
  

• Final UI, with a modified theme to match our landing page:
  

• Conversation with the interviewed Social Media Manager.
  

• Dashboard
  
• Displays the metrics of a Twitter profile.
  
• Tracking the KPIs mentioned across the interviews.
  

• Feedback Loop
  
• Made the feedback form easily accessible ​from the app’s navbar.
  

• The form itself is meant to capture both the user ​needs that we addressed well and those we missed.
  

First Sale

• We tried to reach as many people as we could, in order to try our MVP, provide feedback and see the potential in ​our app, as follows:
  

Groups posts

• Posts Screenshots
  
• Posts Permalinks
  
• Facebook
  

• https://m.facebook.com/groups/DigitalMarketingExpertsJITINFOTECHS/permalink/225031562517341​6/?mibextid=K35XfP
  
• https://m.facebook.com/groups/itechnologyplanet/permalink/6798910543550955/?​mibextid=K35XfP
  
• https://m.facebook.com/groups/freelanceriprofesionisti/permalink/2145238245809691/?​mibextid=K35XfP
  
• https://m.facebook.com/groups/2478715272277829/permalink/2644425375706817/?mibextid=K35XfP
• https://m.facebook.com/groups/webcws/permalink/7223113014376648/?mibextid=K35XfP
  

• Reddit:
  

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/s/w5FO2qwtyO
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalMarketing/s/3YTV4TfXIY
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/digital_marketing/s/L9t40Iy8NE
• https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/s/3ooIylBQHb
• https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialMediaMarketing/s/kuLIcIemuq
  

Users Conversations

• We talked with social media managers, part of them being in touch with us since the launch of the landing page
• These conversations are the ones that organically show how close users are to purchase our product
• Proof

Received Feedback

• A part of the feedback received in ​the feedback section of the MVP
  

Leads Follow-up Email

• We went to the root, to the people that provided feedback on ​our landing page, to present them our product