Synchronize Your Social Media and Email Following
Today, I received an invitation to test out Flowtown. Flowtown is a new application that allows you to upload your email subscriber list and append social media to the list. I tested it with my email list and it worked flawlessly.
As companies continue to adopt social media, tools like Flowtown will come in handy to synchronize their following outside of email and into other social applications and networks.
Click through to the video of how Flowtown works if you don’t see it in your feed or email.
Pricing is 5 cents a record and there are some limits on the number of emails you can send. I’m impressed with quality of the service as well as the accuracy. They already have a Mailchimp integration so I was able to import my subscribers directly from an existing subscriber list within Mailchimp. Pretty nice feature!
The application updated over half of my records and appended Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbleUpon and Amazon accounts where it identified a match. It took approximately 2 seconds per record and the system emailed me when it was completed. I tested about 20 of the appends and didn’t find any issues with them.
What I don’t like is that I can’t export the appended data (or that’s how it appears, anyways). If I bought it, I should be able to export it and just not view it. I’d love to use a system like this and push the data to another Email Marketing Platform. This would allow enterprise clients to upload a delta file of the customers they don’t have data for and manage the email in an external system where they’re storing many more data attributes.
As well, paying for every record is a bit risky if you have a crappy email list. With the past data append providers I’ve worked with, there was typically a base cost and a price per successfully appended record.
Still some pretty cool stuff – looking forward to seeing how their pricing evolves and if they’ll offer an API. There are more services and applications like this popping up – Rapleaf is one that I recently discovered. You can sign up at no cost at Rapleaf and see your own profile… it’s a bit scary, they identified me accurately across 22 different social networks and applications and even identified old email addresses that I had used! Rapleaf also allows you to opt-out of their database, a very very nice feature.
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