TINT makes it easy for brands to create social hubs in minutes. We spoke with their Head of Product, Lukas Prassinos to learn more.
| Company Name: | TINT |
| Located: | San Francisco, CA |
| Partner Since: | 2014 |
| Website: | www.tintup.com |
| Facebook: | www.facebook.com/teamtint |
| Twitter: | @tint |
| Instagram: | @tint |
| G+ | +Tint |
| Your Name and Title: | Lukas Prassinos, Head of Product |
Q: Introduce readers to TINT. What do you do?
A: We are a social media aggregator: we take user generated content from social networks and other sources across the internet and put them into one branded, usable space. This can be a website, TV screen, jumbo-tron, etc.. Our customers use this as a resource to engage their audience and tell a story.
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Travelocity inspired over 25,000 people to market their brand on Twitter, Instagram, or Vine as part of a competition to win a dream vacation.
Q: Why is location data important for TINT?
A: We provide analytics for our customers to help them understand how their social media is functioning and how their posts are coming in. We use Factual location data to understand the geographic aspect of this — where people are posting from. In the product, we return a sort of heat map that lets our customers easily digest this information. With this data, they can make decisions down the line on where to spend marketing dollars.
Q: Why did you choose Factual as your location data provider? What Factual products do you use?
A: We mainly chose Factual for ease of use. We pull in several million posts each day, which ends up being a lot of geodata to sift through. We found that Factual’s Geopulse Geotag easily integrated into our existing API, so we could start translating lat/long data from these posts into meaningful places. In addition to lat/long, we also get a lot of unformatted location data that users provide actively (for example when they tag a place in a tweet). Although this information isn’t very machine readable, Factual is very effective at helping us identify real places from it.
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A snapshot of TINT’s geographic analytics.
Q: What problem does TINT solve? Are your goals the same now as when you started?
A: We started out in 2013 as a B2C company called Hypemarks. Our original intent was to create hubs for friends to share all of their social in one place. It turned out that from a business perspective, this wasn’t great because consumers didn’t want to pay for it. We made a transition to B2B with a similar proposition — take user generated content about your brand and easily share it to tell your story — and it worked out wonderfully.
Q: TINT has grown impressively since its inception in 2013. What are a few key factors to which you attribute this growth? Do you have any advice for aspiring or nascent entrepreneurs?
One piece of advice is to take chances on smart people. Another thing that we’ve done well is create scalable and automated sales processing. What could have taken a sales team of 20, we now have down to 4-6 people. These process improvements have made a big difference in how we manage our business.
Q: Have you discovered any interesting trends analyzing the data you pull in from TINTs?
A: An interesting thing we’ve seen using geodata is which regions of the world engage with social media the most. The Middle East is one of the fastest growing, where people are about twice likely to engage with a brand as they are in the US or Europe.
Q: Have you ever had any surprising feedback (good or bad) from your customers? How did you respond?
A: Something we didn’t expect to see is that brands who ask Instagram users for permission to use their images tend to get 75-80% compliance. This is great, but it generated a lot of unexpected work around making sure images can be properly legally licensed. We’ve since created a whole suite of legal documents and explanations to make this process much simpler.
Q: What has been your favorite moment working at TINT so far?
A: I’ve been at TINT for over a year now and I was employee #8. For me, the best moments have been hitting milestones — reaching revenue milestones, bringing on new members, etc.. We also do quarterly retreats with lots of team-building and road mapping exercises. The most recent one was in Tahoe in a sort of big mansion, which was really fun.
- Julie Levine, Marketing Associate
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