What’s a SXSW bump worth? To Redwood City’s Banjo, which pools check-ins and geotagged updates from friends across all the major social networks, it was worth 100,000 downloads during the interactive part of the conference. That brought the app to more than 900,000 users. Of those, a little more than a half-million users are active every month and iOS users still outnumber Android ones by two-to-one.
That’s not bad for an app that has grown pretty much organically since it came out nine months ago, and Banjo is showing an upward tick in users at least if you look at its footprint on Facebook. Social networking is a tougher category to acquire customers in at least compared to games, where developers usually have very cash rich businesses that can pay for marketing. For comparison, Path has said in the past that it has two million registered users, but it’s not clear how many of those are active. Banjo’s numbers almost certainly make it larger than every new social, local and mobile app that we profiled ahead of SXSW.
On the back of that momentum, Banjo has an update out that makes the app even more of a central hub for all location activity on other social networks like Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. It adds Instagram to the other social networks that Banjo pulls check-ins and location-tagged status updates from. Our own Sarah Perez has called Banjo the “creepy/awesome cyber-stalking app” that shows you who’s nearby based on their Facebook and Foursquare check-ins and geotagged tweets.
Banjo now feeds all notifications all into one place and there’s a new slide-out navigation menu that’s similar to what Facebook introduced to its mobile apps a few months ago.
Banjo’s chief executive Damien Patton said the company was extra careful around not creating too much hype around SXSW. The issue is that the conference has gotten very crowded with product launches which mostly flame out afterward.
“We made a conscious decision not to have a big presence at SXSW,” Patton said. “They’re not our target market.”
He also says that like in earlier years, post-SXSW consolidation is coming soon. “I don’t have a crystal ball to know who will get acquired, but we’re really trying to focus on the mainstream user for now,” he said. Banjo is funded by BlueRun Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
