SocialFlow, a service currently being used by the Economist, the New York Public Library, Pepsi and Human Rights Watch to manage social media campaigns, exited its beta and became publicly available Tuesday.
In the beta stage, SocialFlow increased clicks per tweet between 40% and 60%, on average. But the service comes at a cost: plans covering one Twitter and one Facebook account starts at $99 per month. As part of today’s launch the company is offering the first month of service at any of its pricing points for $1.
Unlike other tweet and social media scheduling services, which primarily rely on sending out messages when most of an account’s followers are online, SocialFlow uses a complex algorithm to determine when interest in a topic covered in a message is being discussed most heavily among an account’s followers, increasing the likelihood of a retweet, click-through or some other form of interaction.
“Social media has gotten to where it is now through gut and intuitions. There’s been a whole lot of art but not much science behind it,” Michael Chin of Social Flow said in a demonstration of the product Friday afternoon. “This looks at what conversations your followers are engaged in, compares it to the message you want to send and figures out the best time to send it.”
Users can use SocialFlow to schedule messages in much the same way they use HootSuite or TweetDeck, but the real advantage is the site’s optimization feature. Messages wait in a queue and are sent when they reach a certain score between one and 100, with 100 meaning the message is sent at the most optimal time.
The service also allows users to integrate their Google Analytics account to track connections to social media, as well as a complete set of analytics tools.
“There’s a bottleneck when it comes to attention in social media – attention is the scarce commodity,” Chin said. “When you keep getting the message wrong, people start ignoring you. You’ve burned away that commodity of attention.”
In addition to social media scheduling and optimization, SocialFlow offers users detailed performance analytics.
