Entrepreneurs making most of Twollow purchase
Published Monday August 24th, 2009
Like any good businessman, Steve Mallett is always looking for new opportunities. So when he heard a fairly new Twitter application called Twollow was for sale he snatched it.
"We heard the service was available and it was in a hot space we were interested in," says Mallett, owner of a small Moncton-based company called Inevitable Corp.
Since 2001 Mallett has run osdir.com, a high-tech computing news and self-help site which is listed as 3,449th in Internet activity monitor Alexa's traffic ranking.
In April, Mallett bought Twollow from a Montreal programmer named Dominic St-Pierre, who created it last fall.
"I just recognized it was a great leap frog into web services," he says. "We were always interested in diversifying into a monthly web service."
The application allows registered users to automatically follow anyone who sends out a tweet, a 140-character message on the social networking and micro-blogging website, with a chosen keyword in it. This allows the Twollow user to read all of that person's messages and many Twitter users will then follow the initial follower.
When Mallett purchased Twollow, the service was free and had about 4,000 users. Then Mallett and his programming partner Luc Aube, decided to make it a paid service and they added features.
Users can auto-unfollow someone who doesn't follow them back after a specific period of time, and can track the exact tweet that triggered the auto-follow.
The company planned to add more features but when more users started registering in a short period of time, Mallett and Aube decided to keep the service simple.
"It's made it easier for people to try it," Mallett said of not upgrading the service. "They're not overwhelmed with a lot of features."
The service currently has about 21,00 users.
Though Mallett says he doesn't have a target market for the service, which costs $6, $10, or $20 per month for, five, 10 or 20 keywords respectively, he says Twollow can be very useful for businesses.
"You're able to monitor in real time what people are saying about your product, your company, and then you're able to engage in conversation with them on a per comment or a per tweet basis," he says.
While keywords can be tracked on Twitter at search.twitter.com, Mallett says Twollow is a time-saver.
"Time is money," he says.
Despite the obvious time-saving advantage Carman Pirie, vice-president of social media for Atlantic-Canadian marketing firm Colour, says the service could potentially lead companies to using ineffective social media marketing strategies.
"To what end would you need 25,000 followers, and what do you think you're getting from there," he says. "The automation of social media takes away the sociability. It's a human-to-human interaction."
Unless a company is engaging in conversation with potential customers on Twitter and other social networking sites, the business is essentially broadcasting through twitter, Pirie says.
"What it amounts to is spamming," he says.
But Mallett says Twollow doesn't automate messaging - it simply connects companies or individuals with their desired Twitter users more efficiently.
Mallett agrees trying to sell something over Twitter is ineffective, and when he discovers people using Twollow to spam on Twitter he deletes their accounts.
"It's impossible to run a monthly service based on spamming people," he says. "When you're in the business of helping people maintain their reputations, it's always good to make sure your reputation is snow-white."
After graduating from the University of New Brunswick's undergraduate business program in 1994, Mallett co-owned a few Dooly's franchises with his father. Though he has no formal technology training, he began teaching himself some computer programming, and then started the open-source directory osdir.com site. "I got into it as something to distract myself from a previous day job," he says. He eventually quit the billiards business to run the website and be an internet business consultant full-time.
Now Mallett is focusing on the Twitter service to cash in on the new hot trend.
He knows there are other social media monitoring services that follow other social media sites, such as Facebook and blogs but they also generally cost more.
Though Facebook remains one of the top social networks, and is continuing to grow, Twitter has been catching up.
"Twitter is the new ground," Mallett says. "People have typically moved form Facebook to Twitter."
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