At 6.26am on June 15th we received a customer support message into the Twilert inbox. This is nothing new.

Just like the social media field they work in, our users are generally very vocal about what they want and where they see the product heading. It’s what we love about them!

And having been around since 2008, when Twitter was just a two-year old baby, in the days when MySpace was still at height having just surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States (yes really), we thought we’d seen it all.

We know that our core user base is a mix of brands, PR agencies, content agencies and the odd law enforcement or public sector body. We’ve spoken to a Canadian government body who use Twilert to track deteriorating weather conditions and a UK-based local police force who use Twilert to monitor crime directly within a 100-mile radius.

Both very cool use cases, both helping us to feel as though we’re making somewhat a difference — the holy grail of any startup.

But the message we received back in June bought that home even more.

“We used your service to monitor specific conversations related to a criminal investigation by Homeland Security and local and state police.The offender has been arrested and charged and his website taken down and your service helped in that process!”

We don’t want to say too much about how they did this but let’s just say that Twilert is always listening.

For us, this is one of the most important uses we have ever been able to assist with and we are now looking to spread the word to other law enforcement companies who could be in need of the same service.

Because even if this is the only online organised crime our small Twitter monitoring tool helps to bring down, it makes it completely 100% worthwhile.

If you work within this field and would like a free session with our team on how to make the most of Twitter search to assist your organisation please get in touch on support@twilert.com.

At Twilert, we’re looking to help people monitor online conversations and pick up tweets that other services may miss. Sign up for your free trial at www.twilert.com

Our Twitter Monitoring Tool Helped Bring Down a Child Paedophilia Site was originally published in The Twilert User Diary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Twilert (Twitter search alerts via email) has been steadily growing for the last 12 months. With little-to-no marketing and absolutely no marketing spend, we’ve reached over 300 steady subscribers across our Basic, Pro and Agency plans.

What this first tells us, is that there’s a need for the product. Secondly, that the product is pretty good. Having reached the 300+ customer mark our goal is now to see what we can improve for our current customers and how we can attract new ones. More on that here.

Where to begin?

Having personally been away from Twilert from just over a year, my first job was to get back on board with the product and more importantly, its customers. If you’re a new product manager or product marketer the process is usually the same. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Do you start with the project-management process, or the UI? The features, or the feature requests? The customer personas or the SEO? Navigating those first few weeks are key after all.

Before diving in to any of that, there’s one thing I’d recommend. Talk to your customers.

A product’s customer base will be able to tell you more about where you’re going wrong and what the product needs, than the product team itself.

The challenge? A balancing act.

Getting into a deep-dive with your product’s customers takes a series of tasks and activities that are both arduous and simple. Some that take five minutes and others that take five days.

Put both together, and you gain a rock-solid foundation of who your customers are, what they want and what they need from the product.

Here’s what I’ve spent the past month doing:

1. Learn the numbers

Unfortunately, you can’t be an ace product marketer without doing a little math. At the very least, a few of the numbers you need to be getting your head around include:

• Number of trialists per month (if you have a trial)
• Conversion rate of said trialists
• Number of paying users
• Churn rate of paying users
• Monthly recurring revenue
• Average number of sessions per sign up
• Life time value

Luckily, once you’ve done the initial setup and formula for each then it’s a simple case of exporting the data or entering new numbers each month for you to get a great feel for where you are. You may also work within a great CRM which does all the math for you. Either way, learn the numbers.

They help you to see at which points in the customer lifecycle your users fall off. From there, you can work out why.

High trialists but low conversion? Speak to your potential customers and find out why they aren’t signing up — perhaps it’s cost, or the copy miscommunicates what they thought the product could do?

Low churn but static customer number? Perhaps your marketing isn’t set up to bring enough new customers into the funnel.

Nailing the numbers is the first step to getting behind the minds of your customers without having to bother them. If in doubt, this post by David Arnoux and the company Baremetrics give really great guides on how to do the tricky bits.

2. Talk to your customers

From having four or five Skype calls with customers this week I learned:

• Many believe that Twitter is the only channel worth monitoring through a social listening tool — Facebook’s API just doesn’t seem to have the same search capabilities
• Twilert does the same Twitter monitoring as Radian 6, just cheaper
• Many customers know how to use Boolean search operators — they just aren’t sure where they are in the Twilert interface
• Twilert is liked because of its simplicity — it’s easier to set up and use than the higher-tier tools currently out there

Talking to your customers will unearth plenty of information about how they use the product, what they find beneficial and what they want to see in future iterations. Perhaps your USP won’t be as you thought, or you’ll just get some really nice testimonials to use across your site.

Get on the phone to them, send a personal email or provide a monthly discount in exchange for some info.

You’ll be suprised at how many are willing to talk.

3. Persona your customers

Here’s where it gets time consuming. Unfortunately, you cannot build personas of your customers from your own ideas or from a brainstorming session. You just can’t.

The only true way to build personas? Pooling each and every single customer you have and then putting the results into one serious excel spreadsheet where you can tally up their interests, use cases, industries and customer history. (NB: I’d say 500 if the perfect sample-size for this task. Any more and it just gets silly.)

This is something I’ve been working on for the past two weeks and while I’m only part way in, the results are seriously interesting.

For example, while much of the Twilert customer base is centered around those working within marketing, PR and social media as you’d expect, there are also plenty of government organisations, schools and police stations who use the tool. This shows that we have an entire pool of customers just waiting to be tapped into.

Another interesting fact is that many of our customers are happy to only have one account manager, who sets up the alerts that then go out to various colleagues. This is contrary to the pricing structure we’d worked out based on the assumption that multiple users would want access to the same account at once.

Dipping into the current customers of your products is worth its weight in gold. You just need the motivation to get through the droll before you can uncover the exciting.

4. Ask for feedback

If you haven’t already, setup a ‘why didn’t you sign up’ form and track the answers of lost users.

One key point for this is to keep it simple — the less form filling your customers have to do, the more likely they are to do it. But of course, you know this. If you use Google forms you can pre-fill info for your customers which will help.

From this, you can learn exactly where you’re going wrong at that last crucial step. Because the type of customer who’s willing to answer one or two questions about why they didn’t sign up is often the type of customer who was one step away from giving you their money.

5. Analyse the process

What does a customer see when they log in the second time? What’s the renewal lifecycle like? How does feedback get managed? How long does it take you to respond to an in-app message?

Have a day where you play around with your product as if you’ve never seen it before. Often we launch a product, have a few beers to celebrate and then focus on the marketing/development/design and forget to log in to the basic interface. When you do, you’ll be surprised at how many typos, illogical sequences and odd call to actions you find!

If that fails and your eyes are already in too deep to see the wood from the trees, do the Mum test and find someone unfamiliar with your product to run it through its paces.

So while some of these tasks are simple and cheap, others are time-consuming and time-expensive. But put both together and you’ll never look back.

What are your key tips for getting under the skin of a new customer base? Do they match the above? Comment below — I’d love to know!

Cover image sourced from Flickr.com

5 Ways To Learn About the Customers of a New Product was originally published in The Twilert User Diary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It’s a Twitter monitoring tool, something we built for a client and ended up adopting as our own. It allows you to get Twitter search alerts by email.”

“It’s called Twilert.”

It sounded okay, but similar. Free tools like Google alerts, Tweetdeck and others within my social media manager arsenal could do the same thing. How was this different?

A few days later, I knew.

Different from Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck allows you to track keywords, hashtags and users but it has to be a conscious decision. You have to remember to open the app, to check it. When you’re busy, checking Tweetdeck may just slip your mind. The same goes for saved Twitter searches.

Twilert sends the alerts to your inbox.

Different from Google Alerts

Google Alerts only alerts you if your key terms are found within the top ten web results across news and blogs. Great if you’re looking for updates on One Direction’s split, not so great if you’re tracking keywords for a company who makes an obscure brand of cheese.

Twilert monitors all of Twitter and Twitter is where nearly all coverage ends up.

Different from other social media monitoring tools

One of Twilert’s USPs is that it was developed before Firehose. This meant that unlike later social media monitoring tools, it had developed a way to work against the twitter search API in a scalable way. By not using Firehose it meant the costs could stay low for users whilst also being a reliable service.

Twilert cut out nearly all of the spam and produced every single important tweet. And was cheap.

Twilert was the type of tool that social media managers and digital marketers dreamed of. I knew because I was one. It had all the credentials; it saved time, it was affordable and it was so easy that everyone from the intern to the office manager could use it.

Suddenly, I was setting up Twilerts that tracked journalists who needed expert comments on stories. Bingo, free coverage for our tech startups.

Next, I was tracking anyone saying anything about four of the products within our product studio. By name, URL, handle and even misspelling. Without ever going near Twitter.

Later, I was helping PR companies, Universities, on-demand startups and a questionable type of shower gel find their niche audiences, competitors and the people talking about their brand (even when they didn’t know it yet).

I was hooked. And I worked there.

Luckily, others were too.

Twilert: the later years

Twilert had been successful long before I came on the scene. It had been featured by Mashable, added to ‘top tools’ lists by Shopify and Buffer and has successfully transitioned from a free tool to subscription service, still keeping its customers. No easy feat (funny story about that here).

By the time it was four years old, Twilert had a growing customer base and was steadily increasing in numbers and revenue. We were able to invest in the product, improve the infrastructure and add new features. 2014 saw the arrival of search previews, assumption testing through focus groups and the growth of a tool that was both effective and scalable.

Later, came an advanced Geolocation tool that allowed users to search for tweets within any area, postcode or City in the world. (Unfortunately, Twitter’s change to the Geolocation API a year later put a dent in that, but hey, you can’t say we didn’t try).

Where we are now

To bring the Twilert journey into the present day, it’s been a little neglected over the past six months or so. As often happens, Twilert got continued as a side project while some new products and big company partnerships came Codegent’s way. (Codegent is Twilert’s parent company if I missed that). We kept up the support and the customer service and we worked on bugs. We moulded around API changes and added to the stability of the core system, all the while adding user requests to a growing backlog of product features.

Our Trello board of suggestions was looking busy.

But we weren’t really giving Twilert the love and nuturing it had blossomed under during its earlier years.

Where we’re going

Twilert is a good product.

We know this because without touching it, it’s increased in revenue over the past 6 months. Here’s the graph to prove it:

What we want to do in 2016 is see how much more we can grow it with a little love and care.

Join us.

We’re treating Twilert 4.0 as a brand new version.

A big part of this, will be working out what makes Twilert’s users tick. Finding out how we can make their lives easier, faster, better. How we can develop features that they actually want and produce the articles and guidance that they need.

In a nutshell, we’ll be looking to help other marketers, social media experts and brand managers who, like a certain Marketing Manager at Twilert, will say “I’m hooked”.

So we’ll be writing about the tests we’re running, the math we use, the challenges we face and the ‘a ha’ moments of making our users want more. If you’d like to read along, give “The Twilert User Diary” a follow and you’ll be notified when we have new knowledge to share.

If you’d like to bag yourself a free trial of Twilert, you can sign up here

And if you’d like to hit recommend, then that would be okay too.

The Story of our Twitter Monitoring Startup was originally published in The Twilert User Diary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.