Social Media Portal

Triden Elite's Lex Barrow on its Twitter Locational Service Twiloco

Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your nama and do you do what do you do there at Twiloco?

Lex Barrow (LB), I'm Lex Barrow and I'm the sales and marketing director for Triden Elite. I aim to promote our latest services and respond to feedback regarding them.


SMP: Briefly, tell us about Twiloco, what is it and what does company do?

LB: Twiloco or Twitter Locational is a tweet monitoring service that allows users to effortlessly monitor tweets and present tweets to an audience. Tweet monitoring is conducted by using filters such as keyword or phrase, hashtag and location.

SMP: When did you start Twiloco and how it is funded?

LB: Twiloco was started early in July 2014 and has been self funded. We felt this was an important project considering the growth Twitter has had over the past few years.

SMP: Why is there a need for Twiloco and what other vendors are you competitors?

LB: Twitter is a fantastic tool for social media marketing and Twiloco steps in when you need to monitor how well your marketing is actually working. Twitter does not offer live location based tweet filtering, as a result it can be difficult to monitor live and respond to feedback and interaction with your campaign.

Twiloco is capable of monitoring up to 250 keywords, hashtags or phrases at a time and can be customised to ignore tweets containing certain keywords, hashtags or phrases. With Twiloco you are able to add a location filter to localise your results. The results collected from your monitoring session can be set to be emailed to you in report form daily, weekly or every third day as well as on demand.

Our main competition to our service is companies/products such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. They are both fantastic tools however they require someone to watch the feeds as they are coming in.

SMP: How are you accessing Twitter data, does it include hashtags and what will you do is f the tap is switched off?

LB: Twiloco connects to Twitter by Twitter?s REST API. In English this lets us access tweets worldwide as they are tweeted. As you can imagine there is a significant number of tweets per second. Twiloco filters through the tweets based on user search filters and returns the results.

If the REST API were ever to be significantly altered and prevented us from accessing the service as we currently do, we could look into scraping the tweets directly from Twitter. While this is an option, I'm not sure if Twitter would be happy with us doing this and that of course is a conversation with them I hope never to have!

SMP: What makes Twiloco different and who are your target audience and why?

LB: Our target audience is social media managers, social media management companies and Twitter power users.

Our service has been designed with usability in mind from day one. Within just a few minutes of pressing the sign in button you are able to be monitoring via your search parameters. Once your session is active you are able to watch your results live as they come in or alternatively you can download our app (available on iOS, Android and Amazon) and receive your results while you are out and about.

SMP: What are the challenges that you?ve encountered and how are you overcoming them in what you have been doing so far while working on Twiloco?

LB: The main challenges we faced during development was adhering to Twitter's high standards for app development. Twitter has a very high standard for developers to live up to, and rightly so. As a result we had to modify and remove several features from our original design. We believe it's these high standards which have made Twitter the great service it is today.

SMP: What are the high moments of what you have been doing so far?

LB: Our favorite moment so far with Twiloco was seeing our presentation being used live at the London Olympia exhibition this year. There is something about seeing your product working as intended in front of a large audience that just brings a smile to your face.

SMP: What do you see as your biggest challenges and opportunities for your sector and the competition that you have?


LB: Social media is a fantastic tool for businesses, celebrities and anyone with anything interesting to say. Our biggest problem is the same that faces any new tech product - exposure in a heavily saturated environment. Any new product or service in the social media sector finds itself caught in a catch 22 situation, you need exposure to gain new users but if you had the exposure chances are you would already have the users.

SMP: What do you think is going to be the most interesting aspect regarding social media for the next 12 to 18-months and why?

LB: I believe the biggest change to come to social media next will be the move away from it being a nicety, to an essential. Companies are already starting to heavily invest into social media and with more and more people using social media to interact with companies before and after they buy from them, the job of social media manager is no longer going to be haphazardly given to someone to do alongside their existing job.

SMP: What you think Twitter can do next to evolve and stay competitive?

LB: Twitter has already begun to branch out into other avenues of social activity such as Vine & Periscope. Periscope is a twitter service which allows users to live stream a video of them to their audience. It's a remarkably simple service which allows users to connect with next to no fuss and interact with the streamer via live chat.

SMP: What are your top overall five Twitter tips and why?

LB replies with:

• If you are linking to a website, place your link in the middle of your text instead of the start or the end, these URL's tend to get clicked more.
• Try to limit yourself to only two hashtags per tweet.
• Pictures are great, if you are tweeting an image if possible try to submit the image in a rectangular size instead of a square. Rectangular images look much nicer on a user's timeline. I recommend 440px x 220px .
• Really ask yourself who your target audience is and use appropriate language
• Link to external studies and independent reviews of your product/service and business.

SMP: Best way to contact you and Twiloco?

LB: You can contact us either via the "chat to us" box on twiloco.com or alternativley you can email us at info@twiloco.com

Now some questions for fun

SMP: What did you have for breakfast / lunch?

LB: I?d never be able to get to lunch time without porridge in the morning.

SMP: What?s the last good thing that you did for someone?

LB: I've always found the best way to learn about life is from people who have been doing it longer for than you. I enjoy chatting to the elderly, you can really get a good insight into how the world has changed so much in such a relatively short time.  

SMP: If you weren?t working at Twiloco what would you be doing?

LB: I've always been a big fan of technology so I?d like to think I?d still be in the industry. I would like to think I'd be working with mobile phones, I love portable tech.

SMP: When / where did you go on your last holiday and why?

LB: 2010 Lanzarote. Funny story actually, a friend of mine sadly had his wedding called off so we (four guys) ending up going on a romantic honeymoon style holiday together.

SMP: What?s the first thing you do when you get into the office of a morning?

LB: Check my email and Snapchat. Snapchat is fantastic for keeping up with friends and celebrities.

SMP: If you had a superpower what would it be and why?

LB: It would have to be flight! Who wouldn't want to be able to observe the world from a different view.

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