Echobox pulled back the curtains today and revealed its newer, better and improved version that the company says is better than the version unveiled back in February, 2014. Echobox works by using your site’s Google Analytics, and mines that data and does its own algorithms to come up with suggestions in real-time on the optimum time to post a certain article in order to capture as much audience’s attention as possible.
The new version of Echobox launched today is a lot narrower in scope and less disruptive compared to the previous version launched in February; the previous version had the editorial suggestions feature. But still the new version does a better job in helping publishers in making sense of their Google Analytics data, and uses it to increase traffic to their site.
“We realized that the problem we were working on was much larger than we had originally conceived. We received email signups from any imaginable news publisher in the world and we use this opportunity to speak with many of them. We found that they were really struggling with getting to grips with their social media,” said Antoine Amann, the Founder and CEO of Echobox.
Amann said there are still many news publishers who don’t properly utilize social media to benefit from its full potential. He said, “We found that they share articles at times that don’t really make sense, or they don’t share articles that should have been shared. If news publishers shared the right articles at the right times, their traffic would increase significantly. More traffic means more revenues. And we all know how news publishers today are in dire need of additional revenues.”
This is exactly what the new version of Echobox seeks to address, designed with a deceptively simple interface that can tell publishers (in plain English), which article to share now, or soon and the estimated traffic the post would attract. Currently, scheduling of articles publications is not automatic, but that feature is coming soon. However, even with automatic scheduling, the social headlines still have to be written manually, so fear not, social media managers, your jobs are still safe.
Amann adds, “Although the UI looks extremely simple (which is something we worked hard to achieve), everything in the backend is highly complex. We use our own machine learning and mathematical models to analyse audiences’ behaviour in real-time and tailor our suggestion to each publication’s audience.”
Amman goes the extra mile to explain why Echobox is different from its rivals like SocialFlow and Buffer. He says, “Neither SocialFlow nor Buffer take private data of the publishers into account i.e. you don’t give SocialFlow or Buffer access to your Google Analytics for them to find sharing times. Instead, they use averaged proxies from public data. This is effective as well by the way. But it’s not as effective as using a publisher’s private data to tailor algorithms. The difference in performance is huge.”
The new version focuses more on social media sharing and no longer has the editorial suggestions; a feature that gave specific suggestions on an article on whether they should be shortened or not, among other things. Amann had this to say, “Offering editorial suggestion in the right manner, without seeming too pushy, is quite a delicate matter. But we will get there.”