(one of our earlier ventures)
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NeedTagger is a simple social media monitoring tool that addresses an important challenge that every marketer faces today:
What is the best way to find and connect with customers and prospects in social media?
Using advanced natural language processing technology, NeedTagger continuously sifts Twitter and detects people expressing needs you can meet. Our Engagement panel eliminates noise and spam, making it easy to connect with prospects and to meet their needs quickly and efficiently.
In a few minutes per day, you can identify and connect with dozens to hundreds of potential customers. Follow them, message them or retweet them, the choice is yours. Every time you share a link, NeedTagger tracks the downstream reactions for you – so you can measure the ROI of your efforts (and of the content you share).
To learn more about what NeedTagger does, check out our Product Features and Needs We Detect (By Industry).
Reach Out And Help Someone
NeedTagger makes it easy for anyone to find and connect with people expressing a need they can meet and to satisfy that need in a respectful and courteous manner.
NeedTagger works really well for consumer-facing companies. The benefits reported by NeedTagger’s private beta customers include the following:
- build a large social network of customers and prospects. Some NeedTagger users are adding high-quality followers three times faster than without NeedTagger.
- generate high quality traffic: traffic coming from NeedTagger posts result in longer dwell times and lower bounce rates
- very high engagement rates: the average click through rate on messages shared from NeedTagger is 5% to 80% per campaign. That’s 5x-20x better than sponsored tweets or other types of messaging on Twitter.
- spend less time sifting through streams for actionable signals: most customers spend just a few minutes per day
In case you are wondering, NeedTagger is not for spammers. We have a strict anti-spam policy.
For Busy Professionals
NeedTagger is designed for consumer-facing product and service professionals who want to build a larger, more vibrant network of customers and prospects on Twitter. It’s ideal for service-minded marketers who believe the best way to build a brand in social media is to offer help, advice and useful content to people in need.
Right now, we detect dozens of needs in a variety of industries, and we’re adding more every month. NeedTagger detects English language needs in the United States market.
We’ve also tested NeedTagger in several business-to-business sectors, and it works fine – but the volume of needs expressed on Twitter tends to be much lower for most B2B industries, with the exception of some technology sectors. So far, anyway. We haven’t tested them all. We plan to add Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and discussion forums in the near future, which may improve the quality of B2B streams.
NeedTagger can also be used for important non-commercial purposes, for example, non-profit community outreach, fund raising and other “needs-based” marketing programs. These need types are on our roadmap, as well.
We can’t wait to see where our customers take us next.
Our Story: A Pivot
We started this journey a little over a year ago, when we developed a consumer tablet app that filtered the real-time web for interesting content and posts related to automobiles and the enthusiasts who love them. It was a labor of love for me, because I am a bit of a car nut.
As we got deep into building our app, the market quickly flooded with excellent, free “media aggregation” apps. It became clear that building an automotive enthusiast app wasn’t gonna be a great business.
We weren’t happy, but we’d proven that our technology was really good at separating meaningful, non-ambiguous posts from noise in a social media niche.
Our team also knew from personal experience that public social networks like Twitter are excellent at introducing two strangers who share a common interest. Sometimes they meet because one person needed information and the other shared an answer.
Most of the time, when someone helps another person on Twitter, it’s almost by chance – there is a lot of noise to sift through. In short, Twitter is great for communicating and staying current on news and events, but we knew that it could be used to do much more than that.
The question we asked ourselves was:
How can Twitter be used to efficiently connect people in need with those who could help them – right now?
We felt that social networking platforms like Twitter would do much more for society if people knew they could get help simply by expressing a need or asking a question “in public”; likewise, businesses would connect with more prospective customers if they could quickly identify and offer assistance to people who needed their help. We knew from our prior work that people ask questions “in the open” on public networks like Twitter. Millions of times a day, in fact. Most of the time, their questions go unanswered.
Sensing an opportunity to do something important with our technology, we turned our energy towards adapting our platform to help reputable organizations connect with people around needs that can be met with the organization’s existing content, people, services and products. We knew that our focus should be on connecting accounts who don’t already follow each other online, because the vast majority of customer-brand connections have not yet been made. Because Twitter represents 80% of public comments, we focused there first. Finally, we thought the best place to start would be to provide tools for businesses to help them find and connect with consumers in need.
The technical challenges we faced were substantial: the solution had to filter-out a majority of noise and spam; it had to unambiguously detect human expressions of need in social media posts and relate them to the products, services and content that the organization provides; it had to do this in real time; it had to allow for simple customization of a “needs stream” for a company’s industry, sector, content and marketing objective. And it had to be affordable.
The toughest challenges – filtering-out spam and finding unambiguous posts in a haystack of noise – was the thing our platform was already good at. So, we got to work on the rest.
After a few months of work, NeedTagger was born.
We spent the past three months in private beta, tweaking and testing NeedTagger in a dozen industries to learn where it works best.
Now, we’re open for business.