TweetSG – SMS to Update

Before and After removing viral URL in SMS updates

It’s a Game of Numbers

This is not the stock market chart showing before & after the financial crisis, this graph illustrates the effects of having a URL (http://tweet.sg) at the end of each SMS updates via TweetSG.

TweetSG started off handling 72 messages/month in the beginning all the way to 197121 updates in July. The live monthly SMS update stats can be seen here -> http://sms.tweet.sg/stats/tweets/month , signup live stats => http://sms.tweet.sg/stats/join (obviously there is no growth after I turned off signup)

Sum the SMS numbers from beginning to June equates to 150501. This value is still less than that of July: 197121. I’d  essentially spammed more than 150501 URLs in Twitter-sphere. July’s figure was not included since I’d turned off the URL early July.

Other effects

The growth effect is clear by now. Now the not so obvious stuff:

Complains. There are bound to be vocal users who simply want it free from URL and are not willing to do anything to contribute back. My way of handling has always been “tit for tat”, you want URL free? Put a banner to link-back in return.

I am not that unreasonable to force the URL down your throat. There are documented options for both groups of people, those with blogs and without blogs. It is a one time effort. That being implemented, there will still be whiners who don’t wanna read or do but just bitch.

As predicted, once URL removed, less bitching, less support.

Google Pagerank. This blog started off as ZERO Pagerank. With these URLs and banner link-backs, it went up to Pagerank 3 in quite a short time. Rather decent since I hardly write much on this blog.

Bumping up your Pagerank makes it even easier for users who are keen to try Twitter via local SMS to find the service since the search engine will be helpful by now.

Web-traffic. Someone made a comment that there will be hardly any recurring web-traffic to this blog; I beg to differ as you can clearly see from the graph. Essentially there are two types visitors:

1. Those who want to try out SMS to Twitter

2. Those who thinks the URL has something to do with the context of the particular Twitter update of interest

Group 1 tend to stay longer within the How-to page. Group 2 will just drift off very quickly (aka Bounce).

Group 2 outnumbers Group 1 but most visits came from Singapore, about 80+%.

Suppose there was a way to show contextual ads related to initial Twitter-update of interest, will there be a higher click-through to those type of ads?

Given the time & short attention span that I have for TweetSG, I took the shortcut and did the easier things: static/rotational banners and contextual Google Ads. It was not very promising, something to note for advertisers.

Conclusion

Spamming is good for your service but inform up-front, allow opt-out.

Can this system scale further? Yes.    Will you do it? No, can’t be bothered now.

To those Singaporeans who ask “Why do all these when you don’t make money???”. I do not do things just for the sake of money alone. I enjoy experiments & designing systems even if it does not relate to my field directly.

To some of those local social media “experts”, your entries are boring and useless. Knowing what does not work doesn’t mean you know what works. Your cyber lip-services are just like bad blow-jobs.

Don’t talk to me about market-share, I am in the position to level the entire playground by releasing the system know-how to folks who are willing to offer their time & resources for the benefit of other users. The better question is, who is willing to run and maintain such systems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 7:40 am and is filed under Did U know?, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.