| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet Web Analytics |
| Founded | March 2009 [1] |
| Website | backtweets |
BackTweets is a Twitter analytics tool which allows users to search through a Tweet archive for links, including shortened URLs [2] that were sent on Twitter.
BackTweets was developed by BackType and released on Friday March 6, 2009. [1] A short time after its launch, the service received significant media attention, most notably from Twitter [3] and popular social media news site Mashable. [4] In March 2011 BackType raised $1 million in seed funding from investors such as True Ventures, K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Founder Collective and others. [5] This was in addition to the $315,000 in funding it had raised previously from Y Combinator and True Ventures. [6] On July 5, 2011 BackType announced that it had been purchased by Twitter, would be relocating to Twitter's offices and would be discontinuing BackType and its API. [7] A few months after the acquisition the BackTweets service was shut down. [8]
On March 6, 2012 the domain BackTweets.com was bought in a public auction by Sorezki Ltd. who re-launched the site as a free service. [9] [10]
BackTweets enables individuals, companies and their competitors to gauge the quantity and quality of their Twitter reach by showing the number a times a link was tweeted [11] as well as the actual tweet that was made. [12] From a business perspective, the BackTweets service can help corporations understand how individuals interact with their brand. [13] The service requires neither a username nor registration to the site. [14] As opposed to Twitter's search capacity, [2] BackTweets tracks all links which were tweeted, regardless of the form they were shared in, which prevents users from getting fragmented information about their Twitter link presence. [15] In response to a search, tweets are returned in reverse chronological order with the most recent tweets appearing first in the list. [14]