CoTweet, the web based Twitter collaboration platform for businesses, has announced a Series A round of funding totaling $1.1 million. The investors are Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.
CoTweet helps companies and brands, like Whole Foods, Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and the City of San Francisco’s 311 manage their Twitter accounts as a marketing channel. CoTweet makes it easy to manage multiple accounts and supports group access to the same acounts, so a marketing team can split up Tweeting duties among themselves but still keep a unified public voice on Twitter.
CoTweet also launched into public beta today — meaning anyone can now sign up for the service. Previously, CoTweet was an invite-only service, with invites being hard to snag.
Finally, CoTweet has announced that it has integrated directly with Bit.ly, enabling CoTweet users to access the real-time click tracking and analytics from the URL shortening service. CoTweet launched in 2008, and is based in San Francisco.
cotweet rocks, I love it. interface is slick and it just works, really well. congrats cotweet!
Definitely well deserved. Looking forward to seeing how the funding effects their development.
A Yammer killer?
Most likely. I think CoTweet will be a success and those of you who are little lost at Twitter should check this out. http://bit.ly/4qjAQu
CoTweet is not Yammer. Nor is it for corporations. It’s for managing your brand’s Twitter presence. What CoTweet does is allow for central management of all the Twitter accounts across a brand with the functionality to assign certain people to certain accounts, make notes and assign particular responsibilities. It also allows you to track who sent what to whom; a useful feature when multiple people are on an account.
It also has some ways to go, but it’s an efficient tool.
My worry (at this point) is that a Public Beta will invite Spammers and those who want to schedule marketing broadcast/spam Tweets.
Tried it. Not too bad.
But why would I use it instead of Tweetdeck or Seesmic? They pretty much offer the same features, everything else (branding, marketing channel, blah blah blah) is just marketing words.
TD and Seesmic are also slightly better because they are desktop apps.
I disagree. Wouldn’t you rather be able to go anywhere in world, and control your company or brand’s Twitter feed – instead of lugging your computer with you just to use Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck? CoTweet makes that possible.
What about twitscoop then ? Even slicker, me thinks. And web-based.
TD and Seesmic are great apps. Companies chose CoTweet because they need workflow to support multiple people communicating through one or more accounts–features like conversation tracking, the ability to assign tweets to colleagues for follow up and the ability to share the responsibility of being “on duty.”
Daniel – What are the chances of someone who is active in twitter or a marketing personnel accessing a public or shared computer?
Jesse – The problem is, there are a lot of sites out there that are providing “branding” services. All it is , is just integrating Twitter and adding some small features here and there and telling a compelling story. Interestingly most of these functions and features can be accomplished on TD or Seesmic itself. Multiple accounts, both have it. Conversation tracking can be easily achieved by using Twitter Search – very simple and also, TD and Seesmic have great tracking capability through their search. All the other features, less than about 1% of users will use them.
I am saying this because CoTweet look very clean and nice and i am pretty it took a lot of effort, but all it provides is just tiny advantages to users and for someone to switch from TD or Seesmic, is very unlikely. There has to be some thing really significant for business users to make that switch. If not, it is not going to happen.
Both TD & Seesmic are currently focused on building a consumer tool. Businesses have very different needs, which is where CoTweet comes in.
Also, neither of those tools allow for multiple authors under one account.
Take a look at this article to see why it’s so important for businesses to be on Twitter, and how CoTweet fits in – http://blog.cot...man-on-twitter/
Also, neither of those tools allow for multiple authors under one account.
Huh..are you serious? Both TweetDeck and Seesmic allow multiple accounts. I have been using it for over 2 weeks now.
There’s a big difference between multiple accounts and multiple authors under one account.
This is the best app I’ve seen developed for Twitter. Best part is CoTweet is driving more revenue already then Twitter Corporate.
A new entry in this space is the recently released Peashoot (http://peashootapp.com). Haven’t used it yet, but wanted to mention it. Also, the site is offering a 21-day free trial.
(Man, Techcrunch has a lot of ads.)
Thanks Sean! I second the vote for Peashoot
http://peashootapp.com
Congratulations to my friends Kyle and Jesse.
CoTweet says they will give plenty of advance notice before they start charging for the service. Looks like third party apps will build a revenue model from Twitter. Maybe Twitter needs to buy up a few of these apps as their model.
Nice article. Smart move: Twitter will eventually buy CoTweet after they figure out which direction they should head to for their revenue model. They’ll testing around now, probally choose something definite in the next 4-6 months. And buy CoTweet in a year or two? Although, developing something like CoTweet wouldn’t be that hard for someone with huge backing like Twitter. They could just make their own version.
- James F.
So many companies need this… If you are stuck in web2.0 startup land, ask your friends that work at big companies and they’ll tell you that staying on top of the social media landscape is important but still really difficult.
the sad thing for us is they’re leaving Central PA. Totally makes sense, but we really would like to see successful tech companies stay and grow here to help future growth.
Great design i love what they did. but when we will see iPhone app?
They launched today, but their web site specifically says “used by companies, agencies and organizations of all sizes” and it lists Ford, Microsoft, Starbucks, SI, Sprint, CocaCola, Pepsi and etc… How is that even possible?
CoTweet has been in Private Beta since January.
CoTweet is great. Had to wait for a while to get on the beta and I am very happy with it. For companies using Twitter for Customer Service (or gasp Marketing) it is a better option than Seesmic (have it love it) or Tweetdeck (have it, love it).
I’m already in love with this product. I could see it replacing my Twitter desktop client, even though the focus here is more about managing your brand and multiple accounts with teams. This is one of the first Sproutcore built apps that I’ve used which runs really, really well.
Now… I would PAY for this service if they added email, RSS, and maybe Facebook integration. I realize this is totally out of the scope of what they are trying to do, but really, if I could aggregate all of my data into one sexy webapp… I’d be in heaven. Especially with the ability to turn something into a followup/task, and share the load with team members.
Quick correction on my previous comment: This isn’t a SproutCore app, as much as it looks like one. It’s jQuery.
How about direct insert into customer and company Twitter and FB? plus SMS and email built into the same platform? If yes, coming in September.
Cullen, just a sidenote, my new product Twitterface (free, public beta launched 7/1/09) does multiple accounts on the web and we will be adding email and RSS along with a ton of other features to it. No Facebook integration planned though, unless I am just forced to!
Regarding turning something into a task we are also planning features around that and I’m interested in doing something for automatic bug submittal for software products if we can make that work. Very excited to be able to use Twitter for functional tasks like this, because of their openness with the api.
Let me get this straight. They raised $1 million for a product that offers incremental feature enhancement to a platform that is still in its infancy and for which there are already lots of competitive options. Wow! What were the VCs thinking?
Congratulations to the CoTweet team! This is fabulous news for CoTweet, and the industry as a whole, as many businesses are struggling to figure out how to incorporate and manage social media within their organizations. This news validates all the work we are doing to develop the tools to help make it easier for social media teams to monitor and manage online conversations.
This looks like a great launching pad for CoTweet.
am keen to check it out.
have you guys tried hootsuite?
i’ve been in the beta since the ground floor, and think cotweet is fantastic.
If Seesmic/Tweetdeck is your normal Gmail, CoTweet is Salesforce!
If you want CoTweet to be a Desktop app use Google Chrome and make it so! (i.e login, click on the paper icon on the right, and click create application shortcut.)
This is the best app I have seen in a VERY LONG time.
I have used Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Yoono, and several more and there is no comparison.
This is changing the CRM game forever!! The only thing I could ask for is integration with other Micro blogging Suites..e.g messengers..I do not know how possible it will be though..
Go guys, you Rock!!!