Track your social media campaigns in style with Peashoot

Peashoot is a spanking new social media app with a funny name but great ambitions.

Developed by Jon “Yongfook” Cockle, a young British/Singaporean developer/entrepreneur with an already impressive pedigree. As well as being the man behind the much publicized open source lifestreaming application Sweetcron.

Yongfook also started a recipe social network called Open Source Food  in 2007, named in the top 50 best websites of 2008 by TIME magazine, it was acquired by Tsavo Media last year and renamed Nibbledish.

So what’s this Peashoot all about?

This latest venture, as part of Yongfook’s new company Egg Co., aims to make it possible to track your social media campaigns across the web. In many respects its currently similar to the offerings of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and (still in beta) awe.sm but with a much more pleasant and professional UI – as we point out later however, there is a great deal more to come.

How does it work?

To start with, enter the URL of the link/product/site/service you are looking to share and keep track of. Peashoot will then provide you with a short URL to share wherever you please.

Once you’ve begun sharing you can track exactly where and when the link have been clicked via a real time report page. Peashoot also highlights on a graph (using little flags) spikes of traffic and indicates why these occurred. The traffic spikes may be the results of a blog post of some sort, a popular twitterer’s share or a post on Friendfeed – Peashoot helps you discover which. Peashoot aims to take things further by offering a custom goal setting campaign option. You can outline details of exactly how many tweets you’re looking to receive, how many blogs you’d like to have write about you, number of referrers and amount of reach you’d like to have from specific locations.

What’s neat, but not all that exciting, is that you can use custom domains rather than Peashoot’s ‘Pea.to’ url. You can also give access to multiple users, making it possible for companies big and small to benefit from the tool – slightly more exciting. Below are a couple of videos demonstrating the basic functionality behind the app. (more details after videos)

What’s to come

Yongfook assures that there is much much more to come. With the current product offering being just the backbone of the service, the app’s future be will focus more on distribution, and method of automating social media campaigns around specific goals. He shares a case example which should illustrate the potential:

I have a campaign that is a limited-time special offer and I want to maximise the returns of this campaign by using social media.

I’ll log into my Peashoot, set up 5 scheduled tweets over the course of two weeks, setting exact times that I want tweets to go out.

Something like this:

1. Hi everyone, we’re announcing a special offer today – click here for a 10% discount on our new product! (peashoot link)

2. Anyone with questions about our new offer, feel free to tweet us!

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5. Just to let you know, our offer ends tomorrow so if you haven’t taken advantage – click here! (peashoot link)

So the campaign runs its course and at the end of it we have one big report (Peashoot already has the reporting functionality) showing all the data that was collected – how many clicks, retweets etc the campaign got, what messages seemed to drive the most traffic, what time of day worked best etc.

Data that companies can re-use for their next campaign (or show their clients).  With Peashoot’s goal-tracking system, we could even build a feature that allows an automated “last resort” tweet to go out if the campaign hasn’t met its goals, like: 6. For the next 3 hours, all products in the offer are 20% off!

YongFook believes this campaign builder functionality is what will will ensure the app becomes a must have component to any online campaign – and frankly, I think he’s right…

Conclusions

…At the moment, as well designed as the app may be and as useful some of the statistics are – there’s nothing which (currently) makes Peashoot stand out above the URL shorteners that have analytics built in. However, whilst analytics is clearly a very important piece of the campaign puzzle, implementation of the campaign is equally so and that’s where it seems Peashoot aims to stand out in the medium term. Look for new features to arrive over the course of the next couple of months and it’s then I would highly recommend delving into this app properly, particularly if you’re a marketer or involved in the industry on some level.

Get started

To try out the service in its current state, visit peashootapp.com and sign up. Unfortunately there isn’t a trial or free account offer which is bound to infuriate some people, but YongFook assures me they’re on the way. Users who are desparate to get their hands on a free trial account can leave their details on this mailing list and hope for the best, otherwise prices start at $15 dollars for basic subscription up to $49/month for larger companies.