For $99 per Month, Socialflow Will Help You Publish Your Tweets at the Right Time
SocialFlow, which analyzes your Twitter and Facebook stream and followers to help you get the maximum exposure for your status updates, came out of beta today. After a bit more than a year of slowly adding accounts …
Context & Ripple Effects
SocialFlow's exit from beta caps more than a year of slowly adding accounts, turning its follower-stream analysis into a $99-per-month product just as publishers are being pushed to justify social spending — a January 2012 study found only 1% of Facebook fans engage with brands, undercutting raw 'like' counts as proof of success. The move also lands weeks after Facebook's 2009 publisher tool made public status updates a direct shot at Twitter, a reminder that both platforms have long treated public posting as contested territory.
The pickup was broad for a niche B2B launch — TechCrunch, VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb all covered the same announcement on or about February 7, 2012 — and it comes amid a charged moment for the underlying platforms: Facebook filed its S-1 on February 1, 2012, while Twitter had just announced geolocated country-specific censorship of tweets in late January.
First-order effects
- Publishers and brands using SocialFlow now pay $99 per month for an algorithm that decides when their tweets and Facebook status updates go out, replacing guesswork scheduling with exposure-optimized timing.
Second-order effects
- The 1% fan-engagement finding gives vendors like SocialFlow a concrete sales argument: if audience counts don't predict engagement, brands have reason to buy timing-optimization tooling rather than simply accumulate followers.
Third-order effects
- If timing-as-a-service pricing holds, an optimization layer of third-party firms builds up between brands and the platforms — businesses whose value depends entirely on continued access to Twitter and Facebook stream data, a dependency the platforms control.
The trend: Brand publishing on Twitter and Facebook is shifting from free manual posting toward paid, data-driven optimization layers sold by intermediaries.