TwitHawk: Twitter Targeted Marketing

Twithawk is a real time targeted marketing engine that will find people talking on Twitter now by your chosen topic and location, allowing you to really hit your target mid conversation with ease.

Here’s how it works in four easy steps, after you sign up at http://www.twithawk.com/ and register one or more of your Twitter accounts:

Step One: The Dashboard

Here’s where you have an overview of your campaign: for each registered account, you can see the number of  active searches, new matches and sent tweets. The Twithawk Noise Ratio shows you the ratio of Twithawk vs natural tweets – Twithawk recommends you keep this below 25%.

Step Two: Add a Search

When managing your campaign, you’re asked to add one or more searches that match your interests, create up to 5 responses which will rotate (responses can also include a short link that Twithawk creates for you using bit.ly), select the frequency of your @replies (these will be sent in a trickle over time, not all at once) an the send method (confirm first / auto send), and choose whether or not you want Twithawk to auto follow your potential leads.

Step Three: Send Queue

Once you save your search Twithawk will start monitoring Twitter and displaying the potential leads found based on your searches and you’ll be notified by email if you have some matches. Be aware that they will expire in 24 hours if they are still unconfirmed, and removed from the system to make room for more recent matches.
From this page, you can personalize / delete / queue / send any particular response to users that match your criteria.

Step Four: Campaign Stats

The interesting thing about Twithawk is that it also allows you to monitor your campaigns with onsite link tracking and Google Analytics integration.

If you have shortened links using bit.ly in your replies, your stats will be shown here in the “campaign statistics” tab. A graph shows how many tweets you have sent on any given day, even tracking retrospectively back to when you first signed up and started using the app. Other stats include: credits available, current matches count, tweets sent, noise ratio, Link tracking, CPC.

Not surprisingly, Twithawk has being criticized for being “the ultimate spam machine”, but the company seems to be very sensitive to the spam issue and has limits in place to prevent it from becoming a spammer:

• The system will spread out your auto replies or confirmed matches so as not to overwhelm your followers, and will rotate through your different drafted responses so it doesn’t appear repetitive when people view your account.

• You can choose to add the users found by the system as friends on Twitter, for you to give a more friendly approach.

• Twitterhawk isn’t completely free, but it charges $.05 for each tweet that it sends.

• There is a blacklist of not allowed search terms (for example “all”, “the”, “am”) to cut down spam attempts.

• You cannot send the same person more than one tweet based on the same search.

• You can use Twithawk to find tweets to respond to and set “manual approval” so that you can give personalized answers or decide not to reply to tweets that are not on topic.

We found the UI and the campaign setting process to be very intuitive and easy. If used wisely, Twithawk is a great tool for local businesses seeking potential customers in their area or marketers searching leads on Twitter. If you’d like to find out more about it and see an example of how it can be used, visit http://www.twithawk.com/services.